“And the sad thing about Sam is …,” B.J. started walking again, “I just don’t think he can stand anybody loving him. He’s got so much anger. He won’t let anybody get close—not really.”
I didn’t agree with that. “I don’t know about that,” I said.
“Flea, Sam hates things.” B.J. ducked her head and touched her forehead where her hair was pulled back and fastened. “You see, there were things his father did that Sam was ashamed to even tell me. And he didn’t like the way things were at home—here.” She told me he hated what his father believed, things everybody around him thought, the way he was forced to be. I didn’t know what in the world she was talking about, so I pestered. Finally she told me things that made me see Sam as a little boy, and the scenes she painted played through my mind like a film, over and over. Still, it was hard to understand.
“You see, Flea,” B.J. said, “Sam was a grown man by the time he figured out what was wrong with what he’d watched his father do—and even then Sam says he didn’t have the sense or guts to say anything—and that’s why he needs to forgive himself.”
“About what? What?” I kept asking.
B.J. glanced at me in the dark that was lit by the street lights on Main. “Well, you see, as Sam told me, he’d hear his father in the hall or in his office as his father would answer the phone or go to the door and it would be a Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Someone from the county sheriff’s office would be telling him that some man—some buck, he’d call him—was in trouble, had cut somebody or gotten too loud, drunk, was being arrested and would Mr. Best pay the bail? Then that next day, that man who’d been in trouble would be working somewhere on Mr. Best’s land, paying off the bail that Mr. Best paid, and when it was paid off, Mr. Best would pay that same man wages on Friday night that he knew would be spent at his liquor store. And then Mr. Best would arrange for a little trouble to break out on Saturday night that would land that same man right back in Mr. Best’s debt. And one of these was Ella Jenkins’ father.”
I was quiet a minute, trying to picture that. I tried to see Cab Jenkins as something like a prisoner working around the house where Sam now lived. “Does she know?”
“No—not really, I don’t think. She only knows Mr. Best helped her father a lot—helped—that’s a funny way to look at it.”
The night was cool, and we pulled on our sweaters but didn’t walk any faster.
“Then when Sam came back from the army, he was bothered by things that had happened there.”
War and killing, I thought and said something about that.
“Yes,” B.J. said. “But other things too.”
“Like what?” I asked, not able to ever stop being nosy now.
“The army, Flea, you know, had two kinds of blood.”
“What kinds?”
“White and Negro. And he hates himself,” B.J. went on. “He hates what he thinks he has inherited. You see—,” she looked at me, straight-on, her eyes held on me as though saying hard things could make us both strong: “Sam believes he’s an alcoholic. That year at Dr. Lissaro’s he was ready to admit it—maybe that means he’s not. I mean, it’s so complicated. The last thing anybody wants to do is admit it. That year at Dr. Lissaro’s every man there was nearly twice Sam’s age. And he was the only one who believed, really believed, he had to be there. Most everybody else was sent by someone. But Sam asked Gill to find out where he could go. Gill got Dr. Lissaro’s name from a doctor he’d known in the hospital. But I don’t think Sam has to drink. I don’t think it’s his center—you know what I mean? I just don’t think he thinks about it every minute, plans everything around it. Or maybe it’s just that I want so bad to believe that.
“Anyway, what Dr. Lissaro would do, you see, was taper them off. They’d appear at the main lodge, like a ranch house with a big dining room, every afternoon, for whiskey that Dr. Lissaro would figure out each one ought to have—to keep off tremors, you know, and seizures and stuff. Every day, the amount got smaller, until after a few weeks or so—sometimes quicker, sometimes longer—they wouldn’t be needing any amount at all. Sam stayed almost two months, so worn out, and needing a place to rest. But shoot, some of them would have stayed the rest of their lives if Dr. Lisarro had let them! But he’d dry them out slow; and us girls—there was always about six or seven there—we’d be the ones to dole it out. We didn’t do it like feeding dogs. God knows they looked so pitiful, strolling in, some trying not to trot, to the lodge, tongues practically hanging out, hands shaking like machinery about to break, holding onto the edge of the counter by the kitchen. It’d been easy to see it as something awful like that. But Dr. Lissaro wouldn’t let it; he treated them like they ought to have better, even if they didn’t think so themselves—or even wanted it. Shoot, we’d walk out, some of us …,” she giggled, “bellies like watermelons under our skirts, some of us so young we looked still wet, sashaying like French maids, balancing trays with shot glasses, clear clean glass with whiskey like dark honey, and hand them out with white napkins. That’s what killed me: napkins! But it saved us. You know what I mean? Dr. Lissaro wouldn’t let things get low. We were that already.”
B.J. stopped. She looked embarrassed. “Lord, we were a sight.” She whooped laughter. “Pregnant unwed girls serving liquor to alcoholics on silver trays in a place like a kid’s camp.”
I played out in my mind how one day, probably, B.J. had passed Sam in the dining room. In my mind, I heard them speak the first time, then more frequently. I felt them beginning to love each other just as Sam and I did now.
B.J. told me how Dr. Lissaro would lend his Stanley Steamer to some of those ready to be discharged, to let them drive into the nearest town to buy new clothes. But Sam would not go. He told B.J. he had had too many near wrecks from drinking.
“I drove him,” B.J. said. “He asked me to.”
I imagined them going out alone in that old car, stopping by the road and picnicking—and maybe more—in a field on the way. I was jealous and yet I was living through it at the same time. But that night, B.J. and I sat on the bleachers at the football field and cheered on the Coldwater Tigers, B.J. yelling beside me. And it didn’t matter that on homecoming night I couldn’t even twirl a baton, not even when Corinne Hamilton twirled fire, wearing a sequined suit that dripped fringe from her tits and boot tops. Everybody said Corinne would probably end up Miss America. But I was B.J.’s friend. And everything that had changed so far was enough for me. I wanted to stop. I wanted our lives to stay there, right where they were, souped-up, having fun, and stuck together. And, oh, how we were stuck together! Stuck as a strange, loony, wonderful team! I even began to see how we fit. My mother—a later version of B.J. And me—an early version of both of them, as well as the daughter B.J. had not wanted to give away. I was something kin to the B.J. that Sam had first fallen in love with in New Mexico in 1945. I was not only B.J.’s youth, I was Sam’s as well. I was a part of their past and their present. I was their love!
On the way home, B.J. told me the rest: “I didn’t mean to,” she said. She looked at me pitifully, sad and disappointed in herself, and then she laughed, rolling it out like beer-belly laughter from the golden goose: “But it was the only job I could get!
“You see, after I had Sam—I mean Samantha—I left Lissaro’s and I was so dumb I headed for a place called Las Vegas. But stupid me.” She rolled her eyes up and stuck her tongue out. “It wasn’t in no Nevada. It was in New Mexico! I didn’t know! Shoot, to me, Las Vegas was Las Vegas and all I knew was I wanted to dance. I wasn’t going back to no factory! I’d had enough of that. I had to move. I mean move.” She twirled, leapt, and landed on the sidewalk and slashed one leg out to the side with her arm over it and spun like a dervish with her hair flying out like the cheerleaders’ pom-poms.
“This fellow in a club there said, ‘You wanna get to the other Las Vegas?’ ” She did an imitation, putting a fat, wet imaginary cigar in her mouth, licking her lips around it, her fingers curved
over its bulk, and lowering her voice like a fat movie sheriff: “ ‘Then young lady, you gotta take your clothes off.’
“He told me no one on earth was going to sit around watching me dance. That was boring as hell. But if I could learn to strip off my clothes while I was doing it; well then, I might could shoot two birds. I mean, you see, I could get experience, get into the entertainment business. He told me I’d probably priss into a drugstore one day, sit on a stool at the soda fountain, and get signed up by some guy who was on the lookout for Hollywood stars. I believed him. Why not! But—well, I just didn’t want to take my clothes off in public like that. My mother would kill me!” She laughed.
“But I had to have a job. And then I studied this woman, Gypsy Rose Lee. I decided I’d get me up an act like hers, comedy, some clothes off, but with a whole lot of dance.”
She grabbed my arm, looking into my eyes and swallowing the laughter that snuck out the side of her mouth anyway: “I called myself the Anatomic Bomber!”
We whooped. We bent over and held our stomachs and beat our thighs and ran down the sidewalk, while a bunch of Coldwater High School boys passed us in a pack and looked at us as if we were crazy or high or wanting it. When one of them grabbed her arm and asked did she want to go with him, B.J. said, “Get on,” low and not ugly, but obviously meaning it.
We crossed over to the street the Second Baptist Church was on and turned up the alley toward our houses. “How did Sam find you?” I asked. “How’d he get you to move here?”
“Flea.” She stopped and looked at me. “I’m going to tell you a secret”—as though she hadn’t already.
She looked down the alley. “I was visiting at Lissaro’s. I liked to take old clothes and things. For the girls, you know. And nobody knows here, but you see, Sam still goes back to Lissaro’s every once in a while, when he needs to. That’s why he made up this story about having an orphanage in Peru.” She laughed. “Haven’t you ever heard what he tells people in Coldwater when he comes back and they ask him why he looks so peaked?”
I laughed. I had heard, and the answer was so typically Sam. I lowered my voice, trying to become him: “I reckon orphans and South American food can do that to you.”
The wonderful crazy mood was there and we fell on it like kids jumping into a pile of leaves. Up until then, if knowing all that stuff about Sam could have made me cool off and love him less, the chances of that now were about as good as Kate the mule’s for having babies. Secrets seemed to only make my love more sure. It was as if I had lived all those years with him, and knowing what he was most afraid of and what got the best of him was about like feeling as close to him as to myself.
B.J. and I walked on down the alley until we were beside my grandparents’ house, and there in the darkness in front of the outhouse she punched my shoulder and hooted. “Watch this.” She twirled around. “I been thinking about crazy, hicky cheers we could make up.” She grinned. The night lights from the newspaper office were shooting up past her knees, and she did this cute little finger click like the Coldwater cheerleaders warming up, and then she yelled out: “Squeeze that orange. Drain that juice. All ‘gainst Coldwater, ain’t no use!”
I hooted, my voice like my Elizabeth Taylor chicken, clucking with excitement at her roosters. “Chewin’ tobacco, Chewin’ tobacco,” I yelled. “Spit on the wall. Come on Coldwater. Get that ball!”
“Flea,” she said, holding my chin in her hand and grinning at me. “You’re adorable.”
And damn! if I didn’t believe her.
16.
Elizabeth Taylor Goes to Church
Some of the things that B.J. told me in her story worried me. I just couldn’t understand how two people who loved each other wouldn’t do anything about how they felt. Maybe B.J. really did back off from Sam because of Ellen. Maybe she loved him enough to step away if she thought that was really best for him. I guessed B.J. thought about Sam like she told me she’d felt about the Big Cheese: that she wasn’t good enough to fit into his life. The only time I had ever come close to understanding that was when I remembered moving into the junior high in Memphis and being afraid to talk to anybody, or the way my grandfather had acted when he came to give a talk at the Peabody Hotel about his medicines. He’d looked in the mirror and combed his hair for a half-hour, and wore a three-piece suit, and used a plantation owner’s voice that had nothing to do with him. It was the craziest thing in the world. Growing up in Coldwater had made us feel known and special, and then when we got out into the world we found out that what had made us strong could also embarrass us and make us doubt our worth.
While I stared at the ribbed bedspread on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, a terrible thought came to me. Neither Sam nor I had ever said anything about how we felt. Maybe that was how things got mixed up and never done. Maybe love, untalked about, could be shoved around and put away—like B.J. getting hooked up with Ron, and my mother and father getting miserable with me, and then each other, and coming apart.
I looked at the wood curls carved on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed. It seemed the easiest thing in the world to do: “I love you,” I said. I went out and sat on the chicken house roof and dropped kernels of corn to the ground, and when Elizabeth Taylor and her roosters came close and looked up at me, I leaned down and whispered: “I love you. I love you. I love you.” There was nothing hard about that. But it could, as I also knew, sound empty and mean nothing. When I said it, I’d have to find some special way to do it. Some way to make it stick.
Whenever I passed the trophy case in the main hall of the high school, I’d look at the picture on the wall of Julie Best in her homecoming queen gear. She’d probably never told Sam she loved him. And if his wife, Ellen, had, obviously she hadn’t done it right—it hadn’t lasted.
From now on, I resolved that every Saturday that I went to the dancing school with Sam, and every afternoon that I was with him after school, I would carefully watch for just the right moment to say straight-out that I loved him. I practiced in the air, reaching up and grabbing his neck and pulling him down to where I could get a good lip-lock on him.
The next weekend was Halloween. I stayed quietly in the house, past the age of costumes and candy collecting, and answered the doorbell for the generation below me. The next morning Miss Pankhurst was on the phone to my grandmother and to half the other citizens of Coldwater. Terrible things had happened. Since there weren’t many opportunities to get excited in Coldwater, a holiday could become an excuse for doing things that were barely connected with it. For instance, a farmer named Thomas Haskins bought a gravestone and held his own funeral on the Fourth of July. He was saving his family time and expense, he said; and they all went to the cemetery at midnight and shot off fireworks.
Usually, on the afternoon before Halloween night people took their yard chairs inside or locked them up, for fear they would be moved across town to someone else’s yard. We expected that by morning most of the windows on Main Street would be soaped. During the night all sorts of people—even grown men into their forties or beyond—drove into Coldwater to do some prank.
Except for the idea of witches, Halloween seemed a man’s night, at least the dark after-midnight part of it. I guess some of this came from, or went into, the story of Cinderella. I sure had the idea that if I stayed out past twelve I would lose whatever magic I had, and my ride home as well.
But in Coldwater, the Halloween of 1959 had a lot to do with women. When we woke up the next morning, anybody who went out on the street found a bra hanging on a telephone pole or a pair of bikini panties slung over a bush. Girdles were strung along Main Street, and a red slip flew from the high school flagpole. “Disgusting,” Miss Pankhurst said. “Decadent,” my grandmother announced. They agreed the Missionary Society should consider doing something about the next Halloween.
That morning also, the weather turned cold and we heard that the Mexicans had been driven home, leaving silently in the night as they usually did.
Then next Tuesda
y the long-awaited Missionary Society meeting finally took place. I was at school—thank goodness! But in spirit I was sure there; I had polished so much silver for it that I suspected I had silver poisoning, if there was such a thing.
Despite the fact that Louella served Sunrise salad, Waldorf salad, and beautiful petit fours, the luncheon was a flop. By the time I got home from school, my grandmother had already taken paregoric and gone to bed. So it was Louella who told me what had happened. First of all, the outhouse had not been moved. Ezekiel had delivered a mound of dirt and set it right beside the outhouse, ready to fill in the hole underneath the minute it got exposed. My grandmother even gave Ezekiel money to buy lilies in coffee cans to transplant on the covered-up hole to beautify the alley. She had called Mr. Rankin every day the week before, but on meeting day the outhouse still sat, dry, gray, too close and faintly odoriferous. When my grandmother called Mr. Rankin early that morning, angry and frantic, Mr. Rankin said that the man he’d hired to haul off the outhouse was sick. There wasn’t time to get somebody else, and Mr. Rankin was too busy to worry about an outhouse.
My grandmother was furious. She wondered if Mr. Rankin had failed her on purpose. Her only recourse was to buy lots of curtains, though anybody coming in the sun porch entrance couldn’t help but see the outhouse. And how could she change the entrance to her home? So not only my grandmother but also those guests who sat at the luncheon tables in the sun porch had to look out onto the alley with the outhouse clearly in view.
Almost worse than that were my chickens. It seems that when roosters are learning to crow they don’t care when they do it. They practice all day long. My roosters crowed through the whole meeting. Whenever the secretary called a name from the roll, a rooster, it seemed, answered. Every name had to be repeated at least twice and even those had to be wedged in between crows. My grandmother told Louella she had never been so embarrassed in her life.
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