Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “How’s it going, William?” he said. “Long time, no see.”

  “We got some bitching stuff,” William answered. “Come over to Tommy’s this afternoon if you can get away.”

  “I quit,” King said and leaned on the trunk of a tree to stretch his legs. “Didn’t you all hear about that?”

  They all laughed. King wouldn’t quit. King wouldn’t desert and go kowtow to the grownups.

  “I got a baby, man,” King continued. “Jessie’ll bring him over in a minute. Wait till you see him. He’s a hoss.”

  “We’ll be there all afternoon,” William said. “If you change your mind, come and join us.” He sat up on his bike, began to ride away. His companion followed.

  “Come on over,” the companion called back across his shoulder. “This is some bitching stuff.”

  “Hey, King, how’s it going with you?” The girl he used to love came over and lay her hand upon his neck. She moved in close. He took her hand and put it down beside her side. He shook his head. She had aborted his child when they were seventeen. He could barely play volleyball with her. Every time he saw her he thought about the day he and Crystal had taken her out to lunch to ask her to have the child. He had gone to Crystal and pleaded with her to try to stop the abortion and she was so much in his power she had done it. Well, now they had K.T. They had Jessie and K.T. but it didn’t make up for what Willa House had done.

  “I didn’t know you still played,” he said at last. “I thought you quit the game.” He backed away from Willa. People were arriving from all directions now. More than enough for two teams. They chose up sides and began to play. The score was five to seven when Jessie came walking up Exposition from the Saint Charles exit. K.T. was lying in the stroller, dressed in a tiny little soccer shirt one of King’s cousins had sent him from North Carolina. Jessie had on the shorts and the white shirt and white tennis shoes with pale blue socks. Her hair was pulled back with the bright silk scarf. She laid a blanket down upon the ground and took K.T. out of the stroller and pretended to be interested in the game. What she was really interested in was the fact that Willa House was playing on King’s team.

  As soon as the next point was scored, King called for a time out and went over and sat beside her on the blanket and took K.T. and held him in his arms.

  “What’s she doing here?” Jessie said. Blood was running up and down her arms and face as though disaster, pestilence, ghouls and monsters pressed in on every side.

  “I don’t know where she came from. I sure didn’t ask her here.”

  “Well, you’re playing with her.”

  “I’m sorry that I am. Come here, boy, you little honey, you.” He lifted the baby up onto his shoulder and stood up. Several people came walking over to inspect K.T.

  “Put him in the stroller,” Jessie said. “I don’t want a lot of people breathing on him. I’m going home. When are you coming?”

  “As soon as this is over. Don’t go away. Stay and watch awhile.”

  “He’ll start crying. He likes to keep moving. He doesn’t like it if I stop.” She reached for the baby. King looked down into her eyes, then he lifted the infant high above his head on the palm of one hand. Jessie was powerless to move. “Put him down,” she said. “Put him back into the stroller.”

  King very carefully lowered his son and laid him down in the stroller. Neither of them said a word. Jessie strapped the baby in and began to push the stroller back down the way that she had come. “Come on,” one of the players called. “Play ball, if you’re playing ball.”

  The phone was ringing when Jessie got back to the house. She ran in the front door carrying the baby and got it on the fifth ring. “It’s me,” Olivia said. “How’s it going in New Orleans? I need to talk to someone.”

  “It’s okay,” Jessie said. “Everything’s just fine. Are you okay?”

  “You sound like you’re out of breath.”

  “I just came in the door. Wait a minute. I have to put the baby down.” Jessie transferred K.T. to the sofa, then sat down beside him with the phone in one hand. “Okay, now I can talk. How are you? Is school okay?”

  “I’m not learning anything. Listen, Jessie, I might come down there for a weekend if it’s okay with you. I’m lonesome for all of you and I’ve got some news. They found oil on my granddad’s pasture. Well, under it. It looks like we’re getting rich. Isn’t that crazy? You see, the land belongs to all of us, mine because my mom’s dead. It’s a deed that gives the mineral rights to all of us, and to Grandmomma and Granddad. My aunts and uncles are going crazy. They’re so happy. My uncles are all quitting their jobs. Well, I thought you’d like to know that.”

  “That’s good. I’m happy for you.”

  “You don’t sound very good.”

  “Well, I am. I’m fine. It’s just this girl King used to go with was in the park at this volleyball game and it made me mad. I ought to get off the phone and call my psychiatrist. I shouldn’t let myself feel like this. It makes me feel horrible. It makes me hate everything. I hate it, feeling like this, like the world is going to end.” She bit her lip, the baby began to cry. “I really have to hang up. I’ll call you back later. I have to see about K.T.”

  “Sure. I’ll call you. How about in half an hour?”

  “Okay. That’s fine. Or I’ll call you.”

  “You don’t know where to call. I’m not at home.”

  Jessie hung up. Olivia put the phone down very carefully and went out into the yard and stood by an abandoned flower bed. She was at Bobby’s house, waiting for him to get dressed and go with her to a movie. It had been chaos around the Wagoner family since Little Sun had made his announcement. Olivia had cut all her classes for two days, although she had managed to keep her appointments in Tulsa, and she had started taking the birth control pills.

  “Now you’ll never marry me” was all Bobby had had to say about the oil.

  “Yes, I will,” Olivia had lied. “Now there’s no reason not to.”

  Jessie sat back on the sofa and opened her dress and gave K.T. a teat. As soon as he started nursing, she started crying. It felt so good and it felt so bad. Life was so terrible and scary and having a baby was getting so messy and boring. She picked up the phone and called Crystal and asked her if she would like to keep K.T. awhile. In ten minutes Crystal and Traceleen were there, with Crystal Anne right behind them. “Oh, the darling little boy,” Crystal was saying. “Oh, the precious, precious little thing.”

  “We’re going down to P.J.’s to get some coffeecake,” Crystal Anne put in. “You can go with us if you want to.”

  “You got the prettiest flower beds on this street,” Traceleen volunteered, noticing the tearstains on Jessie’s makeup. “Anytime you want any help with them, you just let me know.”

  At the park King took a couple of hits off a joint and got onto his bike and began to pedal back across the park. The leaves of the trees were very clear, each one seeming to have the secret of life in its veins. He passed a tree where once he had seen an albino blue jay. A federal judge named Alvin Rubin had seen it also and the two of them had stood there for a long time talking about birds and trees and what the young people of New Orleans were up to. Now the judge was dead of cancer. He had been a tall funny man. Once, when King was thirteen, when his momma first made him move to New Orleans, when she and Manny were still in love, they had taken King to the French Quarter one day to eat lunch and had been caught in a terrible rainstorm. They had dashed into the federal court building to hide out from the rain. They had gone into Judge Rubin’s courtroom and sat at the back listening to a libel suit. In a few minutes the bailiff had come back to where they were and handed them a note. “The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is not to be used as a rain shelter,” the note said. “Please come by my chambers when there is a recess.”

  Now he’s dead. King stopped his bike and thought it over. What did it mean, to be dead? To be finished with getting laid and playing sports and having friends, to be separated fore
ver from Crystal and Crystal Anne and his dad and Jessie and K.T. He got back on the bike and pedaled as fast as he could go in the direction of his little blue painted house with its red porch swing and its beautiful flower gardens and his baby and the prettiest girl in the world.

  Dope was so good. Dope made it all worthwhile. Dope explained so many things. Dope was so much better than talking to that goddamn doctor Freund. She didn’t know a goddamn thing about real life. All she was doing was taking Manny’s money to tell them a bunch of crap that didn’t mean a thing.

  King carried his bike up onto the porch and went inside and found a note saying that Jessie and K.T. had gone with Crystal and Traceleen and Crystal Anne to P.J.’s for coffee. King went back into the bedroom and found the stash of marijuana he had been saving for an emergency and went out into the backyard and rolled a joint and smoked it. This was one day at least that was saved from working his ass off and going to Tulane and being a good boy and talking to a bunch of goddamn psychiatrists and waiting to see if Jessie was going to cry. He sat back on a yard chair to listen to the world.

  He was almost asleep when Olivia called again. The phone rang seven times before he got into the house to answer it. “It’s me,” Olivia said. “Is Jessie there?”

  “She’s gone out for a while. Who’s this?”

  “Olivia. Olivia Hand.”

  “Olivia. Glad to talk to you. How’s it going out there? When can we see you?”

  “I wanted to come next weekend and bring my boyfriend to see New Orleans. We struck oil on my granddaddy’s pasture, King. Well, they haven’t drilled it yet, but they know it’s there. We’re all going to get some money, my whole family. Everyone’s going crazy they’re so happy. Anyway, I want to come to New Orleans and celebrate. How are you doing? Are you all okay?”

  “We’re fine and dandy. Just fine and dandy. Come on down. We’ll go to Tip’s and hear the Nevilles. Who’s this boyfriend?”

  “I think you’ll like him. He’s a cowboy. But he’s the best, King. He’s a man.”

  “I’d like to meet one. They’re in short supply.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m high. Is that okay? On Saturday afternoon can I still get high?”

  “I thought you were in AA.”

  “I am in AA. I’m having a relapse.” King laughed and waited for a reaction.

  “I’m sorry. If you’re sorry, I’m sorry. If you’re not, I’m not. My therapist told me to stay out of other people’s problems.”

  “You’re in therapy too? My mom got you in therapy? I think she’s on the fucking payroll of the American Psychiatric Society. Tell me, Olivia, do you think my mother is on the take with the shrink society, or not? Would she do that? Hey, that would be as good as hitting oil. How much money will you get?”

  “I don’t know. A lot for us. None of us has ever had any money, so whatever it is, it will be a lot.”

  “Sounds good to me. I’m glad. Come on down, when can you come?”

  “Maybe in August. Tell Jessie to call me. You ought to call one of your friends in AA, King. Call somebody and don’t smoke or drink anything else. I mean, I shouldn’t say that, should I?”

  “Why not? Why the hell not? Why shouldn’t people say what they think? Why the fuck not? Well, come on down. We’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Tell Jessie to call me, will you?”

  “I will do that very thing. I will for sure tell her to call you.”

  King hung up the phone. He started to go back out into the yard. Then he changed his mind and opened the refrigerator door. He took out a carton of chocolate milk and began to drink it. He got out things for a sandwich. He piled sliced chicken and lettuce and tomatoes and pickles and mayonnaise on the bread and ate it. K.T.’s water bottles were sitting by the sink. He picked one up and squeezed it. He finished the sandwich. He picked up the phone and called his sponsor in AA and left a message. “Call me up. I’m high. Don’t lay guilt trips on me, Frank. But you can call and see if you can talk to me. I’m not sorry I got high. But I don’t want to fuck things up with Jessie. Call me back as soon as you can.” He hung up the phone.

  Then he walked out into the yard again and began to look at the flowers Jessie had been planting. There was a shade garden underneath a juniper tree with peace lilies and vinca and tall yellow lilies and impatiens and gardenias. It looked just like Jessie, very perfect and orderly; every morning she had been out there tending to it. I was supposed to get her some gravel. Well, shit, she’ll pout about that for a week. Well, I’ll go get her some. If I knew what kind she wants.

  He went back into the house. He was still high enough to appreciate the flowers and be touched by K.T.’s water bottles and think the food he had just eaten was nectar. He was high enough to stop and caress the phone and wonder how plastic was made. He picked it up and dialed the home number of his psychiatrist. “I got high,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you on Saturday.”

  “Meet me at my office,” she said. “Can you come there now?”

  “Yes. If you want me to.”

  “I want you to. Right now.” The woman hung up the phone. She had just been settling down to listen to a new CD of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, something she had once played in a college recital. She had thought all week about the time when she would be lying on her chaise listening to the music. Now this. Well, she had worked too hard on this scandalously beautiful young man to give up now. One hour at a time, she told herself. This is my work. This is what I do. She put on her shoes and ran a comb through her tousled gray hair and walked out to her car. She was singing the music, running her hands across a keyboard in the air. She was in Carnegie Hall. She was wearing a long pink silk dress that rustled as she sat down on the bench. Her high school sweetheart was in the audience. He had grown old and fat and bald but he still loved her. Her husband was on the other side of the auditorium. When it was over he would take her out to eat and then home and make love to her. She was a cross between twenty years old and fifty years old. She moved into the lyrical second movement and got into her car and started driving to her office. High? High on what, for Christ’s sake? I shouldn’t have let him drive. I should have gone to pick him up. Well, it didn’t matter, what mattered was understanding. What mattered was that he had called her.

  Chapter 41

  AS soon as he hung up, King began to regret saying he would meet Doctor Freund. He fought it through a fog of marijuana, followed the idea around the room, decided against it, then wanted to go again.

  He sat back down at the table. There was a vase of flowers on the table, roses and daisies Jessie had picked that morning in the garden.

  He pulled a rose out of the vase and sat holding it between his fingers, thinking of his mother. He was remembering an afternoon on his granddaddy’s farm. His mother had just come back from New Orleans. She had found him in the pasture and told him she was going to marry Manny. He was thirteen years old and he had just made the football team. He was standing by a fence when she told him. He climbed up on it and would not look at her. “What for?” he said at last. “Well, anyway, I’m staying here.”

  “It’s for you,” Crystal had said. “It’s so you can go to decent schools. I have to get you away from here. I have to get you away from Rankin County. King, look at me. Come down from there and look at me.” But he would not look at her. He had climbed down on the other side of the fence and walked out into the pasture where the horses were grazing. He walked away and he kept on walking. He knew she couldn’t follow him because she was all dressed up in a suit. She had climbed the fence and yelled at him. “At least come back,” she yelled. “Come talk to me. Come see Manny. He flew all the way down here to talk to you. King, don’t do this to me. Please talk to me.”

  He had kept on walking and gone on down to the pond and caught Jack and ridden him across the pond a couple of times and then gone over to Darrell Shaw’s house and waited there until dark. Later, when his granddaddy found him, he tried to
reason with him. “Your mother wants to marry this Jew, son, and there’s nothing I can do about it, but I’ll try to get her to let you stay with me. You sure as hell don’t have to go to New Orleans and go to school with a bunch of niggers and Jews. Don’t worry about it, son. Now sit up and pull in your lip and act like a man.” Later, his grandfather whipped him with a belt for being rude to Manny but later he apologized and cried and slept in the bunkhouse with him and the chauffeur and the yard boy. Lots of times he and his granddaddy just slept in the bunkhouse with the help to get away from the goddamn women.

  “Your mother was a crazy little girl,” Doctor Freund was always telling him. “No wonder it’s hard for you to love. But you can learn, King. You can learn to love Jessie and this baby the way you were not loved. You don’t have to live the past over and over again. I want to help you, King. Look at me. Look at me.”

  King replaced the rose in the vase. He walked out on the front porch. I have to go and talk to her, he decided. I told her I would and I’m going.

  Jessie drove up in the car with his mother and Traceleen and Crystal Anne. They all came up on the porch and surrounded him. “I’m stoned,” he said. “Somebody’s got to drive me to the doctor’s office.”

  “Let me.” His mother took his arm. She moved in and began to take him over. “Go on in, Jessie. Traceleen, stay here and help her. It’s okay, King. It’s just a mistake. Come on, let’s go. Are you ready?”

  “Jessie can take me, Mother. You stay here with the baby.” He took his wife’s arm and led her to the car. “Drive me down there, Jessie. K.T. will be all right with Momma.”

  Jessie and King got into the car and drove away and Crystal and Crystal Anne and Traceleen were left on the sidewalk. Traceleen took the baby out of Crystal Anne’s arms and they all began to file into the house. “It’s okay,” Traceleen was saying. “He’s going to the doctor, Crystal. Come on in. Let’s make us a cup of tea.”