Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  Rounding the corner beside the bank, slowing down to keep from hitting some walking Mexicans, was Ezekiel in an old GMC truck. He pulled into the alley and parked beside the sun porch and got out.

  I went to meet him and ask about Kate. When he told me, I didn’t think I could ever forgive him. Kate had been traded for the truck.

  Ezekiel stepped from the running board, gazing back, proud. He held open the door, admiring the inside. There was a dent in one fender and the tires looked bad. But the truck body had been polished into a ruby black, until I could see the reflection of my clothes in its paint.

  My grandmother had let me wear jeans, since Sam had told her we were going to be painting and cleaning up. I studied myself in the hood: “Where’s Kate now? Anywhere close?”

  Ezekiel was admiring the hood too: “Just down the road from my place. A man near Rathwell had this truck.”

  I couldn’t believe any truck could be worth Kate. I stepped onto the running board and crawled halfway onto the seat for a closer look at the old dials and rubber floor and the plastic knob—big as a ripe plum—on the end of the gearshift.

  “Sally!” My grandmother stood on the porch, holding open the door, motioning for me. When I got close, she reached for my arm and led me inside, while saying that obviously Sam had been tied up with business and was running late. I ought to stay on the porch and be patient. Then she added, her voice semi-scolding and secretive. “Don’t you know it’s not proper for a young lady of your age to be standing around with a Negro man?”

  Behind us, the TV crowd cheered for a player who’d just stolen a base. I sat down for what seemed like an awful length of time until Sam would come and rescue me. Every once in a while, I’d glance at her. When a commercial for Budweiser beer came on, she got up and shuffled to the icebox. The light behind the bottles of milk and stuff fell across her face. She looked so disappointed—but it wasn’t connected with anything in the icebox. And suddenly it seemed that I knew something—like a secret—about my grandmother. She brought out the beer she was looking for; and as she shut the icebox door, closing out the wedge-shaped yellow light, the silhouette of her, hunched, bent-over, was like that of someone who’d been stood up and jilted.

  I suppose that, unlike me, she never questioned all the stuff her family passed on. Maybe she thought that if she did, she might damage her love for them. She had told me many times the story of her and my grandfather’s romance. And whenever she had she’d raised her eyebrows, as though my choice in a husband could ruin everything. Sometimes she pulled out old college fraternity pins to show me how many choices she could have had. But her family had lost a lot in the Civil War, and they’d taught her that wealth and aristocracy don’t always endure, but a doctor would. When Horace Maulden went into Mississippi to visit a dying relative, Emily Matthews met him at a church supper. She could, of course, charm anyone; and in a matter of weeks Horace was hers, if she wanted him—forever, too, if she cared to consider it.

  Somehow my grandmother thought that Horace Maulden was on his way to becoming a famous physician who would someday specialize and be greatly thought of in the state capital. I guess my grandfather got carried away with courting and threw in a few juicy pieces that led her to think that. She dreamed of living in the city and doing all of the cultural things she’d been brought up to do. She thought Horace talked of his little practice in Coldwater as a mere stepping-stone; and when she considered the prospect of living in the stepping-stone—it was too far away to visit before the marriage—she assumed it wouldn’t be for long. Living in Coldwater and then finding out that she would be permanently stuck there—where no one knew anything about opera or ballet or could say a correct sentence or much of anything without sucking his teeth or spitting a wad—was her version of eternal punishment. I guess if she thought as I did, she must have been wondering what exactly she had done to deserve it. And maybe that was why she was so angry! Because maybe the only answer she came up with was nothing. She was being punished for his inadequacies, not hers. Which of course made me know even more about how dangerous marriage can be.

  A pink Cadillac turned the corner and floated like a boat to a stop under the magnolia tree. While the Land Rover was getting a new gas tank, Gill was swapping cars every week at one of Sam’s dealerships, following his whims in colors and fins.

  My grandmother came out onto the front porch to wave me off, and I got in the backseat beside Sam while Ezekiel hammered on the sun porch and the Cadillac’s motor turned over. The car was shiny and new but already marked with Sam’s things: his pipe, office files between the cushions, a pair of glasses he wore when he read the small print on legal documents. The upholstery even smelled like Sam—cherry tobacco and candy mints, shaving lotion and traces of whiskey. No Cadillac was nearly as much a part of Sam as the Land Rover. It couldn’t leave the roads and bump up onto the fields he owned. But he’d left a little of himself on it already, and I breathed it in, looking stupid, probably making my nostrils flap like Kate’s when a fly landed on her.

  We rode only around the corner, because Gill stopped the car near my parents’ house and walked to the back door. Then he and B.J. Norris came across the lawn, and she slid in beside me and Sam.

  “Shoot!” She tossed the hair off her neck. “It’s hot.” She grinned. “Whenever the weather gets crazy, I think the world’s coming to an end. This heat in October’s not right.” She looked at me. “How’re you?” Her voice was low and sweet, like it was carrying us a secret. Sam introduced me, saying my name in a way I recorded to play inside my head forever. And B.J. and I both laughed. “Oh, we’ve already met,” she said. Across her shoulders were white ruffles from her blouse, leaving her neck bare, tanned and filmed over with powder that smelled as sweet as jasmine. She had on blue jeans like me, only hers were rolled up over her calves, leaving her ankles bare, tan, perfect, and sexy. Her hair trailed between her shoulder blades, and when Sam got through looking at her, he glanced at me. “B.J.’s going to be our first employee,” he said. “She’s specialized in tap and something else we’re going to call modern movement.” He laughed. “In fact, she’s got a Ph.D.”

  B.J. poked Sam’s shoulder and laughed too. If anybody besides me could have seen the way that Sam looked at her as they eased back against the cushions and stopped laughing, they’d have been sure there was more between them than the business of running a jewelry store. Sam sometimes looked at my mother like that. Until then I’d thought that maybe B.J. and I were supposed to be stand-ins for my mother. But now I wondered if both my mother and I were supposed to be stand-ins for B.J. I wasn’t worried about my mother taking Sam away from me, because supposedly the truth was—and I believed her—that she just flat-out didn’t want him. But with B.J., it might be different. With her—well, I might just have to kill her.

  She reached across Sam and smoothed my hair. “I’ve taken dancing a lot, but I’ve never taught it,” she said.

  Her voice was a coated guitar wire, twanging, humming, rubbing our ears with rhythms that even though I hated her I could have listened to the rest of my life. I had never met anyone so willing to like me, and seemingly for no other reason than I was there. Her eyes bathed me with interest while she asked me where I’d lived before, what I liked—anything, as long as it was about me. And I answered her, thinking that maybe I’d have to get my grandparents to kick her out of my parents’ house and make her move away. But at the same time I was stretching out in the warmth of all that attention she was giving me.

  When I glanced at Sam, I was embarrassed by his smile, tender, private, aimed at her—but also at me. I guess B.J. and I did look a little alike. Every once in a while, B.J. would slip with her English, which showed she was a dumbo and totally unfit for a life with Sam—yet it sounded so natural, I liked it. “I didn’t never think I’d be going to a dancing school—and in a Cadillac! She rubbed the pink cushy seats, laughing. “And here I might even end up being the main teacher. You sure you ain’t teasing about
that, Sam?”

  He laughed. “I consider you qualified to teach anything you want to.”

  We all laughed at the sound of that, and with the general sense of the good fun we were in the middle of having. At the end of Main Street I saw my grandfather standing with some farmers, and one of them was holding open his collar and showing him something on the side of his neck. My grandfather held as many street hours as office hours. Then we bumped up over the railroad track and headed down the highway. B.J. rolled down the window and stuck her head out and let her hair fly back like a wild string cape. She was patting the side of the car and singing “The Wabash Cannonball”—her voice hoarse and jerking on the ends of the words. We were all laughing with her. On one hand I was hoping maybe the Cadillac’s door would fly open and she’d fall out onto the highway, while on the other I was wishing I could move in my old house with her and copy everything she did.

  As we got beyond the city limit sign, B.J. twirled her hair up into a knot, fastening it with pins from her purse. She asked Sam to switch places with me, and we had a grand time cutting up and pushing and poking on Sam while he half stood up, and I slipped under him so I was in the middle. B.J. reached over and touched my hair, and I let her. She arranged it the same way as hers, pinning it as if I’d been a doll. And yet I didn’t want to cut her hands off or hope for a wreck that would only mash her side of the car. Instead I sat still, at first embarrassed with her hands stroking my hair. As she and Sam were both admiring me, I laughed and let her spin my hair up any way she liked, especially if it looked like hers.

  “Well, here it is,” Sam said, as we drove up in front of a big old white frame house that I’d always thought of as the George Best house. It had belonged to one of Sam’s uncles and had been built as a showplace, with even a wrought-iron fence around it and a grand gate. But the uncle had died and the widow moved, and no one could afford to keep it up. Sam had already had a big sign painted that sat on the porch, ready to be nailed up: THE BEST DANCING SCHOOL. We stood and looked at that and laughed and hugged each other and teased and cut up like a bunch of goofballs on a field trip.

  Gill got a box of rags and buckets of paint out of the trunk of the Cadillac, and he and Sam rolled up their sleeves. The tan on Sam’s arms and the way his shoulders moved under his thin white cotton shirt looked so sexy to me, I was hoping B.J. wasn’t watching.

  It was a hot dry October afternoon, and as the sun moved lower toward the fields, we stood on ladders or scooted around on our knees and painted woodwork and porch rails. Catalogues of dancing costumes and shoes were lying on a table by the door. A record player was already plugged in beside it.

  “Let’s take a break,” Sam said after a while. Gill had been suggesting one for some time. Sam asked us if we didn’t want to drive back to town for a Coke or go over to the Dairy Dip. But B.J. said she wanted to stay there and go over the catalogues and weed through the records. She laughed and said teasingly, though we also knew she was serious, that she was a little nervous and wanted to do some homework, since it was her who was going to have to get the dancing school off to a start.

  “I’ll just go across the road a while, then,” Sam said, meaning the Soybean Plant. A group of men could usually always be found there, especially on Saturday afternoons. But first he went into the bathroom to clean the paint off his hands.

  B.J. picked up a record and put it on the turntable. In no time flat she was doing some kind of fancy dance step across the new floor of the living room. “Ain’t this a gas?” she said, glancing at me. She twirled, doing some fast steps that made her feet sound like castanets. Obviously she knew what she was doing, and when she moved you couldn’t take your eyes off her. To me, that was talent.

  Sam came in, rolling up his sleeves another notch and watching us, his face giving away his pride and affection. B.J. tapped her feet and curtsied. I looked back at Sam and smiled. Then B.J. and I just stood and watched him walk out, his neck tan and strong. We heard the motor of the Cadillac start and the crunch of its tires on the gravel driveway.

  B.J. filed through the stack of records and put on one with a fast beat and began doing leaps and turns and making her arms like a train, choo-chooing up and down and back and forth. She was grinning and laughing while her feet went wild beneath her. “Come on!” she cried. I tried to follow. Pretty soon I forgot myself and copied everything she did.

  The record kept going, and our feet kept going, and when the music finally stopped, we fell back against the wall, listening to the needle scraping against the empty end of the record. Then B.J. reached over and hugged me, grinning: “Shoot, honey, you and me are damn good already.” Maybe I was. Maybe all along I could have danced like my mother had wanted.

  We went into the kitchen and drank water straight out of the faucet with our hands. The sun was already low, the light across the back field turning the dry tall grass to the color of wheat. There was a big maple tree near the old garage, half-naked with its red leaves lying on the ground like a dropped robe. “I guess we better start closing up this place,” B.J. said, looking around at all the work we’d done.

  We’d raised the big heavy windows to get out the paint smell. B.J. went over to one on the front wall and reached up over her head to pull it down. In another second there was a sound like heavy wood falling, and I heard B.J. yell. She was calling my name. When I got in there close enough to see, I saw the window had come sliding down so fast, it’d caught both her thumbs under it. The sash ropes in the frame were broken and rotten and there’d been nothing to stop it. “Lord,” B.J. said. “Get it off me.” She was trying to laugh at her predicament and yet saying all the while that even though it looked funny it hurt like hell.

  I had to scoot in front of her with her arms around me and push and heave on the window, but it was a good five feet tall and weighed more than half of me. I couldn’t budge it. I felt like a dumbbell. The thoughts I’d had earlier about getting rid of B.J. seemed crazy. I couldn’t have caused this. And yet, earlier, it seemed that I’d almost been wishing for something just about like it to happen.

  I stared at her swelling thumbs, pinched below the window, and felt tears no more than two inches from my own eye rims. If I’d thought about it much more, I’d probably have thrown up—which wouldn’t have helped anybody. “I’ll get Sam,” I yelled, running out as if I were being whipped.

  The yard was big and a good way from the road. I ran across it, not even slowing down to look both ways, but just kept on, turned my head right, then left, and decided I could make it and darted across the blacktop. Somebody in a blue car whizzed by, blaring the horn and looking out at me as though I were crazy.

  The Soybean Plant was a good quarter-mile down the highway and set back. But I never stopped because I knew that I couldn’t. If I had done anything but run my all-out best, I’d never have been able to live with myself. And while I was running, the mean small suspicion I’d been sitting on all afternoon—that Sam had started up the dancing school as much or more for B.J. as for me—no longer mattered. It was a dead idea that I promised myself I’d never think about again. I didn’t care who bought what for anybody, or why, as long as I wouldn’t lose Sam—or B.J. I wanted them both.

  He was sitting with five other men, some standing around him as he sat in the office of the plant. A glass with liquid so clear in it that it seemed empty was in his hand. He had a look on his face that I had never seen. His grin was lopsided, and his cheeks were red. Everyone there looked up, hearing me coming; and Sam smiled.

  Everyone was watching me. The silence was like frozen air, and I was afraid of it. If I spoke, whatever I said would hang in that silence. As his eyes focused on my face, his grin straightened up. The lopsided, scary part of it moved into only what I recognized. I could see his face looking at me, waiting, blushed red with alcohol—and me. His love was so evident that it was as if he were drinking the sight of me; and I couldn’t look away. All I could feel was something warm and red too turning me inside out.
“We’ve had an accident,” I said.

  My voice shook. I panted and my chest went up and down as I sucked in a whole mouthful of air after all that running. Then I just practically yelled it out, making, of course, a total ass of myself: “I need you!”

  11.

  An Arrangement for the Outhouse

  Only one of B.J.’s thumbs was broken; the other was badly bruised. My grandfather put one in a cast and the other one in a bandage, and the opening of the dancing school was put off for another week. Sam had to go to Little Rock on business anyway. So that next Saturday, I was sitting on the sun porch watching Ezekiel paint the new wood he had nailed to the sides. The day before had been my birthday. I’d turned fourteen. There’d been quite a to-do about it, what with Louella cooking me a cake and all. Sam sent me a card signed from “Your Secret Admirer,” but I recognized his handwriting right off. And just about everybody gave me money. But now things were back to normal, and my grandmother had put me to work polishing silver dessert forks in preparation for the Eastern Arkansas Missionary Society meeting.

  I was set up at a card table on the sun porch, and I could think of a hundred things I’d rather have been doing. My grandmother had already pointed out that she planned to pass on those silver dessert forks to me. I could think of nothing I would rather have less than a bunch of silver dessert forks. But I thanked her anyway.

  She went to the sun porch window beside Ezekiel and looked out it for some time. The millions of crisscross lines around her eyes and the looseness of her skin made her face seem the softest thing in the world to touch—if I could ever have brought myself to touch it. But her face tightened now, and anger gave it a healthy blush. “Mr. Rankin is a prime example of ill breeding. Why, he has no intention whatsoever of moving that thing! Shows every bit of his upbringing.” She went into the kitchen and I heard her pick up the telephone. I knew she was worked up about the outhouse. Her letters to the editor had been mysterious, aimed at businesses cleaning old appliances off their lots; still, everyone knew exactly what she’d meant.