Jessie came up to me, all smiles, and put her hand on the back of my neck. She said, “That’s so sweet. You have sympathy pains.”
I knelt on the floor in front of the TV screen. I could hear Mahler’s First Symphony playing out of the cassette attached to Jessie’s stretched sash. I said, “Well, yeah, I had some pains alright, but I’m feeling much better now.”
Jessie asked me to rewind the sonogram. I clenched my teeth, rewound it, prayed to all the superior beings ever invented for her not to notice the difference.
And she didn’t. While I watched Teresa’s child float around in her belly, Jessie lowered the volume on her Walkman and pushed her chin in toward her stomach. She said, “We’re watching you right now, honey.”
I didn’t say anything about any kind of name recognition, like, “We’re looking at you, Earl or Earline.”
I sat and watched. And I thought to myself, Certainly I want my own child to grow up and be happy and famous and healthy and intelligent. I thought, I want to be able to spend time with my kid, go to games, teach him or her how to communicate, take long trips across the country to see how different people live.
And deep down, oddly, I kind of wanted the kid I watched on the television screen to end up a bandit and a folk hero. I wanted that obscure head and tail I saw on the screen to grow up and be an outlaw of sorts, a fugitive. At that very moment I knew that I’d always keep up with Ted and Teresa’s boy, and help him out whenever it seemed possible. I’d tell him to keep moving, always, in order to stay content, and to talk to strangers, no matter how scary it may seem.
I COULD’VE TOLD YOU IF YOU HADN’T ASKED
DESMOND WANTED TO MAKE A MOVIE CALLED CHICKENS. He wasn’t sure if he had the imagination to pull it off, and he had no hope of grants or investors. The one thing he did possess was a beautiful but crazy wife, though I didn’t know about her right off.
I had no money, either, of course, but was getting some notoriety as a visionary what with the patch of gray hair on the back of my head that looked just like an eyeball, added to the fact that I’d predicted three Kentucky Derby winners in a row, the date of Black Monday, and Hurricane Hugo’s strength, time, and place of landing.
I could see, understand.
Desmond said, “Weldon, I know what I want to do will be a big seller. I just want you to give me the green light, guy. I call it Chickens for two reasons. First off there will be chickens in every scene—somewhere strutting in the background, maybe. Second, I want to train the camera on people and ask them about what they fear more than anything else. I want a man to look into the camera and say, ‘The gang violence around here is scaring me more than cornered rats.’ Meanwhile he’ll be eating a piece of fried chicken. That’s subtext, man. I want to see a kid riding a homemade go-cart in circles around his parents’ shack, going through a herd of chickens.”
I said, “I don’t think it’s a herd. I think it’s a clutch, or a brood. You might want to get that down before trying to approach investors. It’s a bed of clams, and a cloud of gnats, and a sounder of boars. It’s a troop of monkeys and a knot of toads—that’s my favorite, a knot of toads.” I’d memorized The World Almanac, ’cause it had this kind of information.
Desmond stood there in the small kitchen of my small cabin. I drank Old Crow mixed with ginger ale and milk thistle to help replenish my liver. I’d been sitting there almost nonstop—not always drinking, of course—since getting fired from my job a year earlier at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. I had worked in an advisory and public relations capacity, but I’d been on a downward run with the higher-ups ever since l said publicly that the new Coke they wanted to market wouldn’t work whatsoever. Desmond said, “You know I’m not as smart as some people think I am. I’ll admit that. You know my wife wants to leave me because she has fulfillment issues. She says I’m not performing to what she saw as my capacity when we married.”
I said, “You’re going to have to give me a minute to think this one out. It might take me some time to puzzle out what Hollywood wants, and what the people want.”
Desmond said, “I need some time to write out the script anyway.”
He wore a pair of khakis that didn’t quite fit anymore. They hung down low, and his stomach stuck out like a silhouette of Stone Mountain down in Georgia. Desmond and his nutty wife moved from New York down to Christ Almighty, North Carolina, about the same time I made enough money to move up and buy a summer cabin, long before I understood that I might have to move there for good. Desmond thought he’d absorb some of the South for the bestselling novel he planned to write, but the South absorbed him.
Desmond pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. I said, “There’s a job down in Tryon with First Realty. They’re looking for someone to put up For Sale signs. I think they pay ten bucks to put up a sign, and five for pulling it down once the house is sold. Here’s what you do: Get the job. Put up the signs. At night drive around and knock the signs down. They’ll ask you to put the signs back up and you’ll get paid twice. Let’s say you only have ten signs a week. That’s only a hundred dollars a week. But if you keep knocking them down, you could make fifty bucks more. Plus you get the five dollars for what sells.” I mention this conversation to show that, contrary to his subsequent claims, I told him all these scams before I ever laid eyes on his wife.
Desmond said, “I want to make movies. Films, dude. I’ve given up writing novels about upper-middle-class people trying to find out about themselves in new and exciting ways.”
I got up and made another drink without as much milk thistle because I felt dangerous. I said, “After you make the money by peckering around with real estate agents, go put down money on a lush apartment. You put down one month’s rent and the security deposit. Pay in cash. Lie about your name. Then place a want ad in the papers for the apartment for about half what you pay.”
Desmond said, “Weldon. I don’t want to go to jail.”
“You ain’t going to jail, man,” I said. “You’re a filmmaker. How many filmmakers are in jail, outside of that guy who can’t come back to America for what he did with an underage female?”
Desmond held his head funny. I told him to get some nice furniture, tell prospective renters that he’d gotten a one-year job somewhere and wanted to keep the apartment. I told him to get a post office box and a telephone his wife wouldn’t know about.
Desmond said, “Five people a day come in for one month. I show them the apartment, say it’s furnished, and take their money?”
I said, “Ask for cash. Say you don’t believe in checks. Give them receipts. In no time you got enough money to make your movie.” Before Desmond could think about it I said, “Three hundred dollars for the first month, three hundred for the security—that’s six hundred. Six hundred times a hundred and fifty people. That’s ninety thousand dollars. Hell, rent out three or four apartments and you can go beyond documentary-style black-and-whites. Goddamn, boy, I see a major motion picture in your future.”
Desmond said, “My wife’s not a patient woman, Weldon. This has to happen fast.”
I said, “Go rob a bank. Rob a bank, then make your movie. I wouldn’t, but you might.”
Desmond shook his head. He pulled his khakis up, then combed his hand through where he wanted more hair. Outside, a hawk circled above Lake Christ Almighty. I tried to think about people in a theater, watching a movie with chickens in every frame, but couldn’t.
I FOUND DESMOND’S wife dumping ice deliberately, a ritual I’d heard about but taken for myth. Desmond’s wife went in the back door to their added-on house and brought back one of those Styrofoam chests for transporting good meats or vital organs. She stepped softly. She was wearing padded bedroom slippers. I didn’t speak, because what she was doing looked a lot like what I imagined ancient Asian religious folks did during their somber ceremonies, or how a talented seer might act outside in times of rare planetary alignments. Desmond’s wife sprayed Numz-it first-aid medicine between her ice mounds.
I said, “I just wanted to come and see if Desmond was doing okay. I just wanted to see what he’s working on these days.” I wasn’t sure if he’d told his wife about Chickens. I didn’t want to give any secrets away in case he kept plans to himself. It’s a male code.
Desmond’s wife stood there holding the Styrofoam. She wore a thin cotton print skirt that let light flow through—her upper thighs could’ve been used as sturdy, solid thin masts, is what I’m saying—and a T-shirt that read VOTE YOUR UTERUS. It kind of gave me the creeps, but I swear I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. She had big knockers. Desmond’s wife said, “The earth is our mother. Walk softly. I’m about to plant a garden, and I don’t want my mother to hurt whatsoever. I’m numbing her skin before I dig. I’m numbing the dirt before I dig or hoe or scrape.”
I couldn’t say anything except, “Shew—I don’t want to hurt the earth none. I wouldn’t also want to disturb a grist of bees or a down of hares.” What the hell.
Desmond’s wife said, “You didn’t major in geology, did you? I hope you didn’t major in geology.”
I about told her I never went to college. I said, “No. I majored in philosophy in undergraduate school. Then I went on to law school and quit before the year was over. I never was good at the sciences, really.”
“Geologists become miners. Miners end up drilling holes in the earth. You wouldn’t go to a dentist and have him drill into your teeth without any kind of pain killer, would you?”
I said, “Tell Desmond I came by and I’ll try to get in touch with him later.” I started to walk away, back around the cold shallow lake to my little cabin. I kept thinking how men down here pride themselves on not coon-dogging what’s already been treed. We don’t actively pursue a married man’s wife, is what I’m saying. We kill the husband more often than not, or at least get him in a situation that involves a long prison sentence. Thinking about it almost made me have a Pentecostal fit, all thicktongued and spastic.
“You ever been to a proctologist?” Desmond’s wife asked me. She didn’t seem to squint as much as she seemed to want to cry, or pass two stones the size of a bad carpenter’s thumbs.
I said, “I just sit in my room and think, ma’am. I work as a freelance consultant these days, when admen can’t come up with ideas and don’t want to lose their jobs. Please don’t judge me or anything, please.”
Desmond’s wife said, “My husband went down the mountain to do some work. He won’t be back until way past ten or eleven tonight.” This was a Sunday. Realty offices were closed. I knew what Desmond was doing. I laughed and said, “Hey, do you cover your land in sheets of plastic when it hails?”
Desmond’s wife took out a little memo pad notebook from the elastic band in her skirt, and wrote down something. She smiled, and raised her eyebrows. She looked like God let her down on a handmade sunbeam.
I didn’t understand until later that maybe women from up north kept track of when their husbands returned. Maybe I’d gotten too caught up in my own ways to realize Desmond’s wife was sending me a signal.
I LEFT DESMOND’S wife and went home until the sun went down. Then I made my way backwards toward every sign I’d seen lately from First Realty, knowing he’d be nearby in stocking cap and black gloves, sweating from the humidity. I found him hidden halfway down in a carport adjacent to the sort of solid cedar-shake shingle house admired and purchased by people who have a thing for armadillos and alluvial outcroppings.
I said, “Desmond! Get out of there, man, it’s me!”
Desmond shimmied goofily, holding his hand up against my pickup’s beam. He said, “Weldon, you scared the shit out of me.”
I said, “I meant to. Your wife said you wouldn’t be back until late, so I surmised that you got a job doing what I said.”
“Well,” Desmond said. “I got to do what I got to do in order to do what I want to do, you know.”
I said, “Uh-huh.”
We shook hands. He’d already thrown down the For Sale sign a good twenty feet from where he had planted it earlier.
Desmond said, “You didn’t tell me to wear different-sized shoes when I did this. But I’m wearing different-sized shoes. I went down to a Salvation Army place in Spartanburg and bought three pairs of boots ranging two to four sizes too big than what I wear. I wear a normal ten. I figure no one would be able to trace it back to me—unless they open the woodbin where I keep them during the day.”
I said, “There are no cops in Christ Almighty, Desmond. I think you’re pretty safe.”
He said, “You didn’t tell Fiona where you thought I might be, did you?”
I thought, Fiona. I had never met a woman named Fiona, but it seemed like a Fiona would be either the kind of woman who’d numb the earth before digging into it or the kind who welcomed strays. I said, “When she told me you wouldn’t be back until ten or eleven tonight, I told her you probably drove all the way to Charlotte looking for a strip joint. Now don’t go committing suicide with that post-hole digger.”
He said, “Okay.”
“It’s a joke,” I said. “I didn’t tell her anything, you idiot.”
“You don’t know my wife, Weldon,” he said. “I’m not real proud of it, but I have a girlfriend back in New York. I tell my wife I’m going back to deal with an agent or editor. Actually I lost both my agent and my editor. It’s a long story that involves a favorite uncle and his cousin’s wife’s daughter.”
Desmond laughed. I tried not to make eye contact and found myself staring at his chin more than anything else. I said, “That’s okay,” though I didn’t think it was. Listen, I took those marriage vows seriously—even my ex-wife would have to back me up on that one.
We stood while two jets flew overhead, almost side by side. In the brush beside this house a doe rambled, bedding down. I thought about my ex-wife in my ex-city, living not so far from my ex-job. I handed Desmond a beer out of the bed of my truck and said, “There are no chickens living nearby. What’re you going to do about that?”
“When I wrote novels I didn’t care about truth,” he said. “I published a novel about Vietnam and the women’s lingerie industry. To be honest, I didn’t know squat about either. I’m from Brooklyn. All you need to know applies to both subjects—camouflage only works for so long.”
I did not say how it was the same thing in advertising. I didn’t say anything because it looked like we were bonding in the dark, and that scared me. I said, “Chickens.”
He said, “I put ads in some magazines up north for the apartment. People come down here in the winter, you know. I even said it was a condo.”
It would’ve been a good time to tell Desmond that I was only joking, that I made everything up about how he could make money. But his wife worried that the earth hurt, and I worried that she hurt, too. That’s all I could think about there in the dark, with one For Sale sign down and another fifty or so scattered around the mountain. No comet, or shooting star, or UFO showed itself. No Dodge Dart skidded around the curve carrying a trunkload of moonshine. I did not smell marijuana burning anywhere, though I felt hungry and responsible, as always. “Desmond,” I said. “Desmond, Desmond, Desmond. I may have made a mistake by telling you how to make money to support a movie. Don’t you have any family that believes in you?”
I turned the lights off in my truck and left the engine running. I barely saw him, is what I’m saying. Desmond said, “My dad’s dead and my mother thinks I’m still going to write the great fucking American novel. I can’t let her down.” He shuffled a foot in sparse gravel and said, “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and I wasn’t that popular growing up.”
I didn’t ask if Fiona had anyone. I kind of knew. I said, “Fiona numbed the earth so she wouldn’t hurt it
any when she planted a garden, or something. Have you thought about keeping the camera turned on her? I don’t want to make any judgment about you and yours, but I bet a documentary about your wife would be interesting. Hell, all you’d have to do is buy some security cameras and set them up.”
Desmond took a draw from his beer and threw it back into the bed of my truck. He said, “That might be an idea, paisan.”
I said, “When’s the last time you saw a movie about a person who did things a whole lot differently than anyone else?”
“I don’t remember offhand,” Desmond said. “I could’ve told you if you hadn’t asked.”
With that response I knew Desmond needed to go back up north. No one in his or her right mind below the Mason-Dixon line answered questions with “I could’ve told you if you hadn’t asked.” It didn’t even make sense. If it did, people would just walk around aimlessly spouting out answers like, “Carson City is the capital, not Las Vegas or Reno!” or, “Robert Duvall played Boo Radley!” or, “Jupiter’s equatorial diameter is eighty-eight thousand miles,” or, “Tonga’s chief crops are coconut products, bananas, and vanilla.”
I said, “Goddamn, if you got such a hard-on for chickens, maybe you can buy a couple roosters and keep them on your property so they’ll show up in some scenes with Fiona.”
I did not, of course, mean this in an odd, poker-night, jokey way. Desmond took off his watch cap, wiped his forehead, and laughed without thinking about how it might be heard all up and down the mountain, through two valleys, past his job at the real estate agent’s office, and into whatever apartment he rented there at the foot of Mount Christ Almighty on the Pacolet River, “Where Retirees Can Enjoy the Splendor of Country Mountain Living.”
I DO NOT know the cost of spy gadgetry, and didn’t ask Desmond how many signs he set up, knocked down, and reset over a two-month period. He bought his chickens first, over the complaints of the home association, and later set up cameras one at a time when Fiona drove down the mountain for ice, Bactine, gauze, Neosporin, and whatever else she used to help heal the mother on which we live.
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