Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  Yet there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary or even the least bit special about Coldwater. I’d been driven through lots of little cotton towns and each one of them seemed to be just about like it. At certain times of year, the whole town could almost disappear under a coat of dust that turned everything to the color of putty or well-chewed gum. Some of the streets weren’t paved. And there was no stoplight.

  In fact, Coldwater was, I guess, just about as plain as I was.

  2.

  Sam Best Appears

  The Trailways bus station was in the middle of a block downtown. I felt like a dummy in my Easter outfit next to the dingy benches and floors, the sleeping folks, and the sign warning: “Fifty Dollar Fine for Spitting.”

  “One ticket to Coldwater, Arkansas,” my father said.

  “One way or round trip?” the teller asked.

  “One way,” my mother said and pulled off her gloves. Then she looked at me and asked, “You know why?”

  Sure I knew why. They were going to drop me off and be rid of me. But I guess she felt guilty about it. She leaned over and whispered, “After the trial, I’ll have a new car and I’ll drive over and get you.”

  The ticket-teller handed the ticket to my father and looked at me. He was, of course, a potential witness for my father. He was fat and his hair was gone.

  Thinking about that—the trial, and the whole big mess of the fight over me—made me realize another truth. In fact, it hit me square between the eyes about like a wad of spit gum. Until then I’d been too dumb to even see it. My daddy didn’t want me. Not really. He was just using the fight for me to diddle my mama. It’s not like he and I really had a future together or anything. It’s not like we’d spend a lot of time yucking it up on fishing trips. “Let’s get a Coke,” my mother said.

  “How about some ice cream?” My father cuffed me under the chin as though we were members of the same team in the locker room. I didn’t even need to answer. Saying nothing was as good as saying yes. Lord! we were all such good actors. I could have committed murder over being smack in the middle of a Bust-up. It was a funeral I was forced to attend. But we were all acting so damn good about it—which, if you really wanted to think about that, was sure a fine sign for me. For after going through this, it ought to be a snap to knock ’em dead in Hollywood. Then my father said he thought he’d go right down the street to a café and get us some butter pecan. After he left, my mother said: “Well then, let’s just get us a magazine.”

  I followed my mother to the newsstand. While she thumbed through a fat issue of Life, I looked out onto the street. Somebody was getting out of a cab and reaching back in for shopping bags. I could see her back, bent-over and broad. The black sturdy lace-up shoes she had on seemed familiar to me. I’d watched those shoes and those exact feet, standing just like now, somewhere in my past in Coldwater. But where or why I couldn’t remember.

  I wasn’t expecting to know anybody at the bus station. I figured my mother didn’t need witnesses. Almost anybody in Coldwater would come to my parents’ trial and testify that she was good to me. It wasn’t really her style to plant a witness anyway. She probably wasn’t even going to trial. No doubt she was planning to let me rot it out at my grandparents’ until I was thirty-five or forty, and then she’d come back with her million gold records. She’d sell my story to Modern Screen, about how she’d had a daughter so ugly she’d had to hide her away in a cotton town in Arkansas.

  “Let’s get this one,” my mother said, handing me the fall issue of Seventeen, which had a model on it in wool clothes so hot that the thought of them just about gave me a heat stroke.

  While my mother paid, I watched the back of the lady in the black lace-up shoes as she hurried into the bookshop across the street. She was half covered up with shopping bags. Something about the way the back of her hair curled looked familiar too. I knew that people in Coldwater seemed to have a special talent for going out into the world and bumping into each other. Once the Second Baptist preacher ran into the owner of the Soybean Plant at The House of Vestal Virgins in Rome, and it was written up in the Coldwater Gazette, which started a whole new trend of people writing in to say who they’d seen where when they’d least expected it.

  On the other side of the waiting room my mother aimed for the Coke machine. By now it was obvious my father was having trouble finding some place to buy ice cream. And he wasn’t giving up. So we were sitting on a bench looking out the front window of the bus station, sipping Cokes out of bottles and thumbing our magazines, when somebody else from Coldwater dropped in. Only this time we knew only too well exactly who it was.

  “Mercy,” my mother said, getting up. “Sam!” She laughed nervously. “It’s been ages.” They hugged.

  “Do you know how long really?” he said. “Thirteen months and three days.”

  “Well.” My mother glanced at me. I was still sitting down, holding a Coke. “I guess that’s right. We left just about this time last year.” She laughed, a low bitter laugh that ended flat. “It didn’t do us a lot of good though, did it?” She smiled at him and looked away. “I guess you know Hodding and I are breaking up.”

  “S’what I heard,” he said. They both sat down, one on each side of me.

  Sam Best wore a dark striped suit over a white shirt. He was tall, big through the shoulders, yet lean and sort of leathery. To me he looked like someone who rode the range, and owned it. He even had cowboy boots, dark with tooling, made out of alligator or lizard, sometimes with silvery scales like snakeskin. Today they were black and seemed new. Some people in the bus station glanced at him, then stared for a moment.

  People in Coldwater said Sam Best could charm tattoos off sailors and sell you a piece of chewed gum for a dollar. A year before he’d flown to New York and been on “I’ve Got a Secret.” He’d stumped the whole panel by being a millionaire from Arkansas. So if people didn’t recognize him, they stared on general principles.

  I turned to look at Mr. Best’s face. He noticed me and winked, then reached into his pants pocket, while hiking himself up off one thigh to rattle his change. “I’m really sorry to hear about you and Hodding,” he said, looking from me to my mother. “But then again.…” He smiled—a boyish sort of grin—and reached into his other pants pocket. “Might be for the best.” He pulled out packages of cigarettes and peppermints. After he offered them to my mother, he held out the candy to me. He always carried mints, sourballs, or chocolate kisses that melted in his pockets, causing wads. As my mother held the cigarette to her lips, Mr. Best reached over me and flicked on his lighter.

  “Sometimes,” my mother said, blowing out smoke, “you just can’t fight it anymore.”

  Sam Best shook his head. He stood up and walked to the front window. Taking off his suit coat, he threw it over his shoulder. The muscles in his back moved under the thin cloth of his shirt. In the inside pocket of his coat, I caught a glimpse of a silver flask. And then he folded the lining to hide it. He came back and took the chair beside my mother.

  “I want to say something to you now that I want you to think about, really think about,” he whispered—which sounded to me like the beginnings of something right intimate.

  My mother reached for an ashtray and crossed her legs. She said, even though she didn’t look at Sam: “You been over here to the cotton offices?”

  He stared at her, then at me. It was obvious they were bothered by my being there. So they were just going to change the whole subject. “Yeah. Front Street,” Sam Best said, getting the hint. “I come over one Saturday a month, at least. And if I take the bus I don’t have to worry about driving.” He laughed.

  Sam Best hated to drive. He said he was scared of it, which made everyone laugh. He could say outrageous things and everybody just assumed he didn’t mean it. For a while, people in Coldwater offered to take him anywhere he wanted to go. But then he hired a driver, saying he could spend time in the back seat tending to business. So my mother and I both knew he had probably taken
the bus that day to see her. He could have learned from my grandfather that today was the day for returning me.

  “Sally,” my mother said, digging into her purse. “Go buy a package of gum.” She put a dime in my hand and took my bottle of Coke and held it over her lap.

  At the newsstand that was part drugstore, I picked up several packages of gum, thinking about choosing one. But the whole time I was standing there, I kept glancing at my mother and Mr. Best. He reached over and touched my mother’s hand. I bought some Juicy Fruit and then inspected a bunch of digestive aids lined up on a shelf. My own stomach didn’t feel especially good, but mainly I was looking at the medicines so I could stand even closer to my mother and Mr. Best, and could hear.

  Mr. Best held my mother’s hand and looked down at it. “You can marry me and I’ll get you a maid. I’ll get you a cook. I know a man in Nashville who makes records. I’ll sing as a backup. Watch this.” He did a ham-bone, humming all the while, thumping his thighs and chest, alternating the palm of his hand with the backside, turning his body into a set of bongo drums that sounded wonderful. I put my hand over my mouth to stop my laugh. If I hadn’t been told to get lost and wasn’t having to hold myself incognito in front of those damn stomachache medicines, I’d have jumped onto the middle of the floor and boogied like a crazy person. I had this thing about tap dancing. My mother had taught me how when I was little. But then she’d stopped teaching me, and I was sorry, for I don’t think I’d ever seen a tap dancer who wasn’t having a hell of a good time.

  Mr. Best could do the best ham-bone I’d ever seen—or heard. Everybody in the whole depot stared; some tapped their feet and juked along with him. Then Mr. Best stopped as suddenly as he began. My mother was laughing, her eyes watering. She was searching in her purse for a Kleenex.

  “We can go on the road,” he said. “I’ll buy a guitar. Say yes.”

  My mother stopped laughing. “Sam, you’re already married.”

  “No, I’m not.” He looked at her. “Ellen went to Little Rock. She took Julie and moved out. She says she might want a divorce.”

  My mother swallowed and was quiet a minute. “Oh, Sam. I hadn’t heard. I’m sorry.”

  “Coldwater’s getting slow.” He grinned. “I thought you’d heard by now. She left two weeks ago.” He let go of her hand. “We weren’t ever married, at least not much. You know that.” He pulled his eyes at the corners. “We were both Japanese—Southern Japanese. It was arranged.”

  My mother laughed, but sadly.

  Mr. Best smiled. “We can run off together and get divorces by mail. We can take the bus to Mexico this afternoon. We’ll take Sally and set up housekeeping in Acapulco. Say yes.”

  My mother giggled. It was flattering.

  “We can live anywhere you want. We’ll do whatever you need to be happy. I’ve never seen you happy.”

  “Sam,” she whispered. Turning him down must have been awful. In his own way, Sam Best was as good-looking as my father, only he was fun and rich. She held her head to one side, crying a little. Then she laughed bitterly. “But if I married you, it wouldn’t solve anything. I don’t doubt you love me, but I can’t return that. I love Hodding; but he can’t return that, so we’re no better off. No one would be happy. I couldn’t do that to you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.” Sam Best covered her hands on my Coke bottle with his own. “Just think about it.”

  My mother sat silently, then lit a cigarette and looked at the newsstand for me. I just wanted everyone around me to get what they wanted. I didn’t see what was so hard about it. When I got out into the world I sure wasn’t going to have a messy life. I wasn’t even going to get mixed up with any man for long—which was probably going to be easy since no man would want to get mixed up with me. And I’d already decided that whenever I found out I was having a bad day I’d just get back in bed and wait until it got better.

  I walked back to them with my package of gum. “Here,” my mother said, handing me my bottle of Coke.

  Mr. Best got up and went to the men’s room. And when he came back and sat down beside me, he smelled faintly of whiskey.

  “Sam,” my mother said, stubbing out her cigarette and running one hand down her shin over her nylon stockings. “Do me a favor—will you?”

  He smiled. “Sure, Boots. Anything.”

  “Keep an eye out on my girl, here.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “You know she’s going to Coldwater until we get things settled.”

  “Sure.”

  “And, she’s never ridden the bus by herself before—have you?”

  She looked at me.

  “No’m.”

  Sam Best put his arm around my shoulders from the other side, covering my mom’s arm. “Sure. We’ll stick together.” Then he looked at me, face-on. His eyes were dark brown, deep in the center but on the edges sort of faded like the streaked sides of pecan hulls. And in them was a blend of sadness and mischief, or if not exactly mischief, then something kin to the hope and eagerness I’d seen in the eyes of stray dogs. “You know,” he said, smiling at me, “there’s nothing to riding the bus. S’why I do it.” He laughed.

  My shoulders were cradled there on the pewlike bench between my mother and Sam Best when my father came back with three dripping ice-cream cones. He politely offered one to Mr. Best, and Mr. Best turned it down just as we knew he would—even though he might have been dying for it. We all had these incredible manners.

  Sam Best kept up a running monologue about cotton and soybeans, feed corn and rice, while watching us lick that ice cream back onto the cones. When the bus pulled up in front of the station, we went to stand in line.

  “Let those colored people go on around,” my mother said, and straightened my hat. She reached to kiss me, and when she finished she offered her cheek to Mr. Best, who was, after all, leaving for Coldwater too. But the whole time my mother was moving into a kissing position with Mr. Best, she was glancing to see if my father was watching.

  “I’d be happy to,” Mr. Best whispered, looking steadily at my mother. He started a brotherly kiss on her cheek, then slid around hunting for her lips, found them and hung on.

  My mother put her arms on Mr. Best’s shoulders, raised one leg in a display of arousal and glanced at my father.

  I sat down on my suitcase and picked my thumbnail.

  If Sam Best’s display of desire for my mother was supposed to uncork my father’s, it fizzled. Walking over to the bus, my father leaned down and examined the drive shaft under its belly.

  The kissing business took a while, so all the other passengers walked around us. “You didn’t see that, did you?” My mother looked at me, embarrassed.

  “No’m.”

  My father took my suitcase and handed it to the bus driver to put in the baggage compartment. Then my father came back to me, put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me. “Take care of yourself,” he said as we walked together to wait in line behind the other passengers. While all this was going on, some colored baby was screaming his lungs out in the back of the bus. I knew he had to ride back there—at least, if people in Alabama were changing the rules of where they sat in a bus, nobody was bucking the custom in Tennessee yet—but his crying filled up the bus just as if he’d been in the front seat. I settled next to a window, and Sam Best shuffled in beside me.

  By then my mother and father had moved to the side of the bus so they could look up at me and Mr. Best. They were already waving, even though the bus driver hadn’t sat down yet. Then behind them, I saw, running like an abandoned duck, those lace-up shoes from the bookstore. All along I should have known they belonged to the Coldwater librarian, Colleen Pankhurst.

  “Boots Maulden!” she cried, setting down her packages and holding her hat with one hand. She hugged my mother and looked at my father. “Oh, Hodding, I’m glad to see you! Boots, there’s a sale at Goldsmith’s you wouldn’t believe!” Then she glanced at the bus and yelled: “Don’t leave me!”

  The bus driver looked at
her, cleared his throat, and wrote on a clipboard. He was tall, skinny, and pasty white. Gold-rimmed glasses encircled his eyes like two loops of a sprung Slinky. I didn’t think he’d ever been in the sun.

  “Good luck, honey.” Miss Pankhurst hugged my mother again. “Next time I come over I’ll call you and we can have lunch at the Peabody. Could you come?”

  But there was no time for an answer. The bus driver honked the horn; and Miss Pankhurst picked up her bags and, with my father’s help, climbed on.

  The bus pulled away from the curb. Colleen Pankhurst and Sam Best and I waved and my mother and father waved back, standing side by side for one of the last times that year. Inside me something came up and closed around my heart, pinching it like the snap of a door spring catching on the end of a shirt. For a minute, I didn’t think I could even breathe.

  But then I remembered—my mother and I didn’t get along. About all we had left was a mutual admiration for Elvis. And my father didn’t like the way I fished.

  The bus soon crossed the bridge over the Mississippi River. And with that baby screaming most of the way, we headed into the flat cotton country of Arkansas.

  3.

  Me and Miss Pankhurst

  Sam Best slept. The baby got quiet too. And across the aisle from Sam and me, Miss Pankhurst had settled herself in. She’d spoken to me so kindly that I felt I was suffering from a disease. To her, I guess I was. If Sam Best had heard my parents were splitting up, she had, too.

  “Honey, you just ask me for anything if you need it,” she had said, leaning across Sam Best before he went to sleep.

  “Ah, she’s in good hands,” Mr. Best had said, meaning his.

  Miss Pankhurst was the school librarian in Coldwater, which meant she wasn’t in charge of much. The library was in a small room next to the cafeteria. It had one set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and two shelves of fiction. All of the bindings smelled like northern beans. That’s where I’d watched the back of her in those shoes lots of times while she’d been shelving books.