Tomato Red

by Daniel Woodrell

  Jamalee twisted her shoulders about, her body bumping me back, trying to clear her some elbow room. I pulled away from her a tad and she twisted over onto her back. The purple robe bunched around her waist like a life preserver.

  “Hot,” she said. “Awful hot.”

  Her tomato head came up as she sat up and she undid the robe, yanked it loose, and pitched it to the floor. Her tomato flopped to the pillow again and, God, the entire dictionary of feelings came into play inside me in various parts. I’m a person who digs good smells and she had herself one. Her eyes were open about halfway. She laid there an itty-bitty beautiful small person with thick untended pubic hair that was brown.

  I let my bath-towel skirt fall.

  She spun into a spoon again and I followed her. Bones in her ribs and shoulders came through her flesh clear and easy to trace. To me she was special and all, but she didn’t carry a chest rack like her mom did, or have that real lush type of behind, but still she was special and all, I think, in a different lean bony way.

  I slid my hand past the crack in her ass, from the rear, there, and got a hold on her snatch with a couple of fingers and rubbed. I added in several neck kisses and groans of gratitude and wonder. My fingers rubbed as on a lucky coin or something, a rabbit’s foot or silver bullet.

  “Be good to me,” she said. “Or bad.”

  I worked a finger in her. It wasn’t like dipping into a spring or anything. She wasn’t juiced up with desire exactly. I pulled my hand back and spit on my finger and sent it in again, which went better, slightly. She had a few sounds in her throat that I guess were meant to encourage me but didn’t.

  “Look,” I said, “we don’t have to do this.”

  “Hey, Sammy, listen—I’m a human, too, myself. I don’t want to be alone, you know?”

  Her comment just then planted the happy hopeful notions in my head that would later come to haunt and run me ragged. They were planted with plenty of bullshit to grow on and certainly did.

  “That thought has appeared in my mind also.”

  “So, Tarzan, what gives?”

  Well, it got to be skin on skin and she put a rubber on me with an awkward grip and I climbed on and the thing got going. She made some grunts I couldn’t decipher. She laid still as though I might miss the target if she wiggled or thrashed or even pumped along at a slow pace. Her eyes were rolling up like an accident victim. The kind you see laying alongside the highway on a stretcher, eyes wobbling, dealing with their fresh concussions.

  “Oh, baby,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, baby, baby.”

  When it happened, nothin’ much happened. The bare minimum of joy got harvested. Uh, uh, uh, then I squirted; she made a noise and hopped away and went to the john. Pretty soon I heard dishes rattle in the kitchen.

  I helped myself to another of Bev’s cool menthol cigarettes. I walked to the kitchen, toward the rattling dishes. Jamalee was inside one of her tents, a green tent. I got close and tried to hug her from the back and she came stiff to attention until I stepped away.

  This mood was not the mood you hope for after sweaty business has gone on. It was as if from lifelong spite toward her mother she’d made a pledge to never enjoy sex much. I’d say her mom kind of got the better end of that stick.

  Jamalee popped the fridge open. I looked out the screen door and saw it was full dark with fireflies out there; then I saw the candles flickering across the way on a card table in Bev’s backyard. I believed I could smell fried chicken.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  BEV SAT BESIDE the card table of food under the tree behind the flickering candles and spoke: “Did you all get yourselves washed real good and cool? I surely do hope you did. Because it has just been skillet-hot out here waitin’ on you. You all do look like maybe the heat has been at you, though. Goodness knows it’s been at me pretty rough. Don’t you know heat this high makes my temples throb, then pound. Throb and pound. Throb and pound. You do look a touch flushed, hon. Both of you do.

  “I hope the two of you-all won’t have to feel all that throbbin’ and poundin’ like me. I’d hate to see that—a mother always hopes her children will have it better than she.

  “Now, as to hunger, for food, you all just help yourselves to whatever’s left of the feast that the flies didn’t shit on too much already. I’ve been waitin’ a good long while, throbbin’ and poundin’, and there’s been flies and bugs about aplenty.

  “Now, ol’ Biscuit has ate extra good in the past hour. Beer, Sammy?”

  “Damn straight. Thanks.”

  The beer rested in a bucket that had earlier been full of ice but now was slightly cool water. The fact that Bev had brung beer, too, shows you so clear where her heart was at. I didn’t feel real tall in Bev’s eyes at that instant, but I had a rugged thirst on.

  For a while me and Jamalee did eat. Bev smoked smoke after smoke and tossed back glasses of wine. We all said hallelujah when a breeze shuffled by. Only drumsticks and wings were left. The abandoned cats started circling. The file folder was on the table, I noted, underneath the potato salad dish.

  Jamalee didn’t say a word for quite a spell, only chewed and swallowed, staring at Bev.

  Then came a point when she flung her attitude back at Bev: “Mom, does anal sex hurt?”

  “No more than it should, hon.”

  “Mom, did you used to get more money back in the days when you used to swallow?”

  “Oh, goodness gracious, yes, hon. More of every good thing—most of which went to you and your brother.”

  A mouthful of beer right then somehow squirted up my nose and made me spew and hack for breath.

  “Mom, did I ever tell you how much I appreciated all the sacrifices you made for your kids?”

  “Why, no. No, you never have.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Oh, I agree, hon. I’d rather you don’t lie to me.”

  I said, “Those cats sure are throaty at night.”

  “Huh. See, so often, Mom, I’ve wished you would have lied to me.”

  “Well, when you get to be an a-dult, baby Jam, maybe I’ll be able to explain things to you in words you understand.”

  “I think I understand the words that apply to you, Mom.”

  “You’ve set quite a spread here, Bev.”

  “I’ll bet my sweet left titty that you don’t, hon. Not nearly.”

  “Funny thing, I’d say the potato salad tasted best.”

  Anyhow, a certain kind of quiet set in there for a short time that was mostly all tension with smoldering edges and loved ones having thoughts they’d like to scream at each other but didn’t.

  I FELT A huge togetherness with him seeing him dead in the pictures. The camera didn’t give his body much of a break—it caught the horrid aspects and the homely smallness of it all. The pictures were dealt out the way solitaire is dealt out along the carpet beneath Bev’s brightest lamp, and they told a story that made you want to slam your hands over your ears and run with your eyes squeezed shut. Jason laid there dead in each and was seen from several angles. He laid there sogged from pond scum, his hands hovering stiff above ground, the fingers spread, two fishhooks shining snagged in the web between thumb and forefinger. His hands seemed in death to be attempting a little gesture, barely started toward a wave, maybe, or that palms-up move that means stop! Stop! Stop!

  “No,” Jamalee said. “Huh-uh. I can’t see more of that. I can’t.”

  There were sniffles and such from Bev’s green chair.

  “Broken arm,” she said. “Broken arm. He didn’t break his arm in that pond the way they say.”

  The dog stood at the door, whining to come in.

  “If he died over golf . . .”

  Wires from different worlds were crossing in my head and I got static as a result. Incomplete murky ideas garbled to me.

  “Well,” Jamalee said, “there’s also the fellas you snitched on in days gone by.”

  “Don
’t say that. Shut up about that.”

  “Plus,” I said, “your run-of-the-mill queer stompers. This town has them like any other.”

  “But if he died over golf . . .”

  I heard myself say, “Anybody at that club knows about any rough stuff it’s goin to be that tush hog that sneak-punched me. That puts me in the right mind to do the thing that needs doin’. I believe I’m goin’ to drop in kind of sudden on that motherfucker. I’m goin’ to ask him direct questions, if the answers test out wrong I’ll shoot that motherfucker. I’ll hurt him so bad to where his grandchildren fall over in heaps. I’ll make God hisself ask me to go a li’l easy, please. And I’ll disregard God’s please, too, most likely.”

  The only sound for a minute came from Biscuit, still whining. The photos on the floor shined, reflecting the lamp-light like a spread of mirrors you didn’t want to look in.

  Then Jamalee says, “Oh, hell, yes. I’d say that’s a plan. Plan enough, Tarzan.”

  22

  Skull and Rags

  YOU KNOW IT, too, how so many times when you enact something that turns extra big-deal wrong it wasn’t what you set out to do at all, or even had in your mind or the back of it. Sometimes you just paused to say, Hey, man, how you been doin’? or maybe you’d say, Just pay me when you get it, or, Do you love him? There was no misdeed in the forefront of your intentions, just skanky chance and nasty chemistry and the wrong words conspiring at you, then click-click, bang-bang, and what you have done wasn’t what you’d had in mind to do that day but it sure enough got up in your face and happened.

  Oh, what a shame.

  Mercy, mercy.

  At those times you puke and guess God is merely a meddling sort of pissant warden with a series of teachy and insulting events planned that will make or break you, bring you in meek to be loved like a dumb soft lamb, or throw you away for good to continue life unloved on the planet as a loner mutt who’d rather bite a lamb in the ass than lay beside one.

  That coin when it comes to you only has the one side and you wake up every dang day livin’ on it.

  That morning I woke smack-dab there again.

  Jamalee had a mood on that influenced me from the kitchen. Her stomped footsteps were complaints meant to stir me from bed. The dishes rattled like questions she wanted to ask of me in a sort of brittle tone, I think.

  I figured nerves had rubbed raw in her overnight, as this was the day we’d said we’d wave Rod’s pistol at a select citizen or two and provoke some breathy answers. I got dressed, then reached high in the closet, past the stacks of old shoe-boxes and such, and pulled down the pistol. I checked the clip and the chamber, then tucked it into my belt line and wore it with the butt sticking up.

  Straightaway I could feel that I walked different.

  The sun slammed bright light and tough morning heat into the kitchen. The heat helped release odors. Jamalee wore black pants pegged at the ankles and clingy in general, with shower sandals and a red T-shirt that left her belly out to be seen. She leaned against the fridge and was drinking a glass of root beer without ice.

  “No coffee again?” I said.

  “No. There’s root beer, it’s got caffeine.”

  “I can’t take it warm like that.”

  “Tsk, tsk. Somebody didn’t refill the ice tray.”

  The first smoke of the day was lit.

  “It might not’ve been me that didn’t.”

  “Huh-uh. That doesn’t work, Sammy. If it wasn’t me, which it wasn’t, it had to be you, which it was.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I see the math there. Okay, want to whip me for it? Want me to bare my butt so you can whack on it?”

  “No, huh-uh. That’s actually a part of you I’ve decided I don’t care to ever witness anymore. We’ll forget that one hour of that one day ever happened. Please? That’s what I’d prefer, at least.”

  “Geez. Was it, was it, what? Awful? Scary?”

  “Let’s not review yesterday’s lesson, Sammy.”

  “I said we didn’t have to, you know. I said that.”

  A train was coming too close to be talked over, and we stood there each stuck in our pose, staring, while the tracks screamed and the shiny wheels kept crushing onward. The shack vibrated and hummed like a cheap gadget that had just been plugged in and was already defective.

  She said, “I never even truly thought about doing things by myself before. Before Jason got killed. Before then I never had, but I sort of have now.”

  “You ain’t alone, Jam.”

  “I’m not?”

  “I’m right here.”

  “Aw—you’re with Bev. Because of the sex business.”

  “We can do without that. We can be together the way a certain style of brother and sister are. Or old folks. We don’t need the sex.”

  “But you men, you’ve got to have your sex stuff. Got to have it.”

  “So? Your mom, Jam, she really knows how to do, believe you me.”

  “I don’t care to feature that picture in my head, Sammy darling. I don’t care for that at all.”

  I ran tap water over the cigarette stub, then dropped it into a bean can that stood on the stove. There came a cat yell right then, and a second later Biscuit hustled to the screen door, wanting in fairly bad. I bounced the door open with a boot toe and held it for the sad-sack mutt.

  “But,” I said, “we’re still tight, right? You and me?”

  “Well, yeah. I suppose. We’re still something.”

  “We’re still tight, that’s what.”

  “We’re around each other a bunch.”

  I went ahead and had a cup of warm root beer. The bubbles helped me drink it down. I fired a fresh smoke and looked at the cup and dreamed it into a cup of rich black coffee. The smoke helped the dream almost work.

  The phone rang on the wall there in the kitchen. Jamalee answered, and her eyes rolled and her shoulders fell.

  “Uh-huh, yes, this is Mrs. Pelkey. . . . Uh-huh. They’re doin’ fine, just fine. . . . I didn’t fill it out? Huh. Could you mail it? With all these kids in summer and no car it’d make a hardship for me.” Jamalee stood by her crib sheet of details taped to the wall, her eyes scanning up and down the list of facts. “That’s Nova. . . . Yeah, she’s just great. . . . That’s cleared up. . . . Lita and Troy, right.”

  A burst of voices came from the side yard, the tone of the voices asking for attention, and our eyes met in the kitchen.

  I whispered, “Hear that? Is that Bev?”

  She said, her eyes narrow, “But—but really it’d make a hardship for me. Three kids and no car on foot in this heat.” She used her hand to wave me toward the door to look out. “Well, I’d be sure and mail it straight back to you.”

  It was Bev in the yard in only her red naughty-nightie with William the John Law marching her this way. He had a hand clamped on the back of her neck and he was squeezing. Her face showed discomfort. The sun came clear through her garment and you could see her rack wiggle and a tuft of private hair. John Law was saying things with his mouth real near her ear.

  I spun toward the fridge and set that nagging pistol on the top shelf, where the milk would’ve been if we had any.

  Jam said, “Somebody said that? Well, that somebody who said that is a liar. A damn liar.”

  The screen door whipped wide and William shoved Bev in before him. The pistol at his hip had his other hand on its butt and the little doohickey was unsnapped.

  He gave her a shove and unclamped from her neck.

  Bev bumped the stove and kept her eyes down. She seemed to look at her feet, which were grass-stained faintly.

  “William has some shit he wants to say.”

  “Has to say,” he added. He caught Jamalee’s eye, then raised his front finger to his throat and did a slitting motion. “Hang up and listen, kid—now.”

  “Ma’am?” Jamalee said. “Ma’am? My lord—Troy just fell from the apple tree and he’s bawling like he’s serious hurt. I’ll call you, hear?” She put t
he phone up, then said, “What’d we do?”

  “Button up your lip, kid. Don’t even bullshit me. All of you sit your asses around that table, and keep your fuckin’ hands on the top of it, and button those lips. You’re fixin’ to hear the most weighty words you ever have heard. I’m fixin’ to tell you white-trash morons a thing or two that’s vital—do you know that word? Vital to any tomorrows you pecker-woods hope to lay around in and piss and moan the way you trash do.”

  Bev said, “You’re from just barely over. . . .”

  And he swatted her on top of the head and made a thump.

  “Hush!”

  I started to rise to take my swing but he eased that pistol halfway from the holster.

  “Boy,” he said, “if I want I can make you go away this minute. There’s hardly a wrong thing that’s happened around here you couldn’t be found guilty of. You’re a natural fit for any flimsy frame, plus there’s the stupid junk you definitely did do.”

  He had us placed where he wanted us. We bowed our heads in the heat, hands on the table, ears way open. He had the floor all to hisself and seemed to dig the way his words bounced from the walls and made us cringe.

  “You poor silly sacks of shit. You ignorant white-trash scum. One, the kid drowned—do you understand? The sissy boy wanted to show off that he was a gay blade and dove in that pond fully dressed and got unlucky. Two, okay, maybe he was tossed in that pond by somebody hereabouts who traced his disease back to the kid. A li’l problem in the blood that’s been blamed on your boy. Or, could be he asked the wrong ol’ hillbilly to let him suck his dick—that’s a scene that can go mighty sour, you know.

  “Then you idiots go bustin’ into offices where you’ve practically advertised you were goin’. This is causing agitation amongst folks you’d really, really rather not agitate. You really don’t want to do that.

  “Hey! Did I say yet that there’s at least three hundred miles of roadside ditches in this county, and that you-all’d be easy to drop in a deep one anywhere along there in all those miles? Did I point that out yet?