Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  Opening her eyes, Ella saw us being led to a table near her, and as Sam leaned to sit down Ella let a roll of chords move over the piano. She threw her head back and laughed. Her teeth shone like a sudden burst of someone throwing confetti on a parade. Without stopping, she turned the chuckles in her throat into the first notes of a song about somebody so rich that he could hire men to plant trees when he wanted shade. Everyone around us laughed, looking at Sam. He sat down, grinning, placing his arm around me and leaning against the table.

  Gill eased back in his chair, his face less angry now as Ella joked with her voice and used the notes under her fingers to play with the words, too. “Life is sweet for those who live on Easy Street,” she sang, while glancing at Sam. Then she moaned and spoke: “Tell us about it, Mr. Best.”

  Ella’s voice was like a deep jar that she swirled the words around in and then poured out over a teasing edge.

  While Gill brought us all something to drink, Ella started a new song. Sam sent Gill to the bar to get me a cherry to put in my Coke, and then reached into his coat pocket and took out his flask. He filled his glass and leaned over it, propping his elbows on the table. Ella sang something fast. The beat was solid and monotonous but the words were clear and funny. The saxophone came out loud behind her.

  Gill came back and sat down. B.J. got up from a table near the bar. Until then I hadn’t seen her. She was sitting with Ron, and she came toward us wearing a coat over her costume.

  Leaning over us she smiled, taller in her high heels than I was used to seeing her. She said several things to Sam, but he didn’t answer. If B.J. was trying to reach him, she didn’t do a damn bit better than I had, because after a minute he pushed away from her and took his drink and went to the piano and sat beside Ella, who moved over, smiling, making room for him.

  While her fingers found chords with no particular melody, Ella said that it was time to sing her most requested number. She laughed once, a loud quick sound that she lowered into her opening note. Then the saxophone moaned and Sam sang along with Ella, and everyone in the whole room seemed to laugh.

  B.J. stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. Sam’s voice was deep, off-key a little, but nice and scratchy under Ella’s. And every note she sang seemed wrapped in a thick honey tone, just on the verge of a laugh. Everyone in the whole room was smiling. Then the claps and whisdes filled the room and the laughter eased out.

  “Come on, Flea,” B.J. said, touching my back.

  She led me into a long hall and then a dressing room. In the mirror I watched her pull up my collar and ask me what in the heck I had on, and at the same time hug me so I couldn’t answer, while she told me that I was the cutest thing in the world. She was laughing that deep-coated laugh that reminded me of warm honey. She was brushing my hair when two women came in, dressed in costumes similar to B.J.’s. While they put on makeup, B.J. chatted with them and told them I was her kid sister just out of the army from Texas.

  One of them, whose name B.J. told me was Sue, looked at me and laughed. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “A wack.”

  The other one laughed. “No. A wax.”

  B.J. and I laughed. Our eyes met in the mirror. For the first time I saw how funny I really did look.

  While B.J. kept kidding them about what kind of gun I could shoot and how I could drive tanks, she’d grin at me in the mirror. She put makeup on both of us, so that when she was done she looked wonderful and I looked like something the U.S. Army would dishonorably discharge.

  “Cute kid,” the woman named Sue said, turning to examine me more closely. She was dressed in an orange costume that I could tell would come off with one touch on a certain string, and her mouth was colored to match it. She held her lips out sort of pouted, and a scarf was tied around her hair so it trailed over one shoulder. “Look what I got from Mr. Easy Street,” she said, opening a box of candy and passing it around. “Nice Christmas present, wouldn’t you say?” When she smiled she didn’t look so tough. In the mirror I could see how her teeth were too small for her face, and wrinkles dug half circles around her mouth.

  “No, thanks,” B.J. said, waving the candy away. She walked behind me to the other side of the room where she had left her makeup case and started rummaging around in it.

  “What’d you get?” Sue said, following B.J. while lighting a cigarette.

  “Same thing. Sam gave us all the same thing.” B.J. was hunting around in the bag, pulling up things and putting them back.

  “You’re blowing it,” Sue said, saying it low as if she didn’t want me to hear. She got closer to B.J., but I could still hear what she said, since I could halfway read her lips by watching her in the mirror. Sue leaned close to the back of B.J. and tried to whisper: “Marrying Tillman’s going to cut you off with Sam.”

  B.J. shrugged her shoulders, yet I could tell she was having a hard time meaning it. “Oh well, can’t have everything. Right, Sue?”

  “Ought not. But I got a feeling it’s different with you and Sam. You all got something else going. That’s why I don’t see why you’re messing it up by getting married. You could probably end up the next Mrs. Best if you played your cards right.” She looked around. “Now wouldn’t that be swell?” She hummed a few bars of “Easy Street” and laughed. The other woman watched and laughed, too.

  “Yeah, well, Sam’s too old for me.” B.J. tried to sound light.

  Sue laughed. “Just about right to leave you a rich widow.”

  “Okay, Sue.” B.J. came back to me, carrying a lipstick she’d found in the bag. She tipped my face up and put it on. Her fingers were shaking a little. Then she brushed my hair all over again, pulling my head like crazy.

  Sue put a coat on over her costume and walked out. The other one poked at her hair with her hands a little and then left too.

  B.J. stared at me in the mirror. She looked ready to cry and forced the bristles of the brush into her palm. “I can’t let you think of me like that. I guess you might already, but not like that.…” She sat down and touched my hand, then moved back. “I know I shouldn’t do this. But I’m going to tell you how things are, because I can’t stand being something to you I’m not. It’d hurt too much for you to think of me that way. And even though my telling you’s going to be selfish on my part, I can’t help it. You just got to know the truth.”

  Sitting down beside me, she looked into her lap and pretended to study her hands. “You have to understand something about Sam, Flea. I don’t know how to say this.… But the truth is, sometime soon after Sam was married he got too afraid of having more children. You see, he’s scared of what he thinks he is and what he thinks he has inherited and what he thinks he might pass on.” She looked at me, letting her words find meaning in the way that I looked back at her. “That’s what ruined his marriage more than anything. And sometimes …” she walked across the room. “Well, there are rumors he goes out with women here, or other places around the state. And some people even say that he goes with Ella Jenkins, but I don’t believe that. They’re friends, and that’s all. But people will say anything; you know that, and Sam’s the kind of person stories naturally grow up around.”

  She wrapped a scarf around her neck and straightened the dresser, talking fast. “I know some people think I broke up Sam’s marriage, but that’s not true. He talked me into leaving New Mexico and come be with him. And then … well, I met Ron, and Sam … oh, Flea. You know, I’ve always told Sam I’d never marry him. There’s no way I’d ever mess up things for him like that.” She smiled, then looked at me. “And the thing I’ve got to make him see is that what he needs to do is go back to Ellen. She’s the one who loves him. But Sam just can’t seem to accept that. He’s always got to go after somebody he knows he can’t have. And I’ve got to straighten him out about me marrying Ron or he’s going to end up at Lissaro’s the rest of the month.”

  She looked at me in the mirror, meeting my eyes. “I’m awful. I’ll burn in Hell. I told you all this because I wanted me to look good t
o you. To save myself.” She sat down with her back to me, looking through stuff on the dressing table. “You need to go on now. I’ve got to get ready to sing.” I saw her watching me in the mirror just as I was about to walk out. “I can’t sing worth a damn and that’s what’s wrong with my act. Nobody past a dink town in Arkansas hires a woman who can’t do anything but dance.”

  I walked slowly down the hall, thinking about all she’d told me.

  She was wrong. I loved Sam. He could have me.

  20.

  I Am an Object of Desire

  “Where’s Sam?” I asked, sitting down beside Gill.

  Gill looked sour. He didn’t say anything to me. He helped me scoot my chair up under the table and pulled it close to him. I could tell he and Sam had argued.

  B.J. came onto the dance floor. I glanced around me but I didn’t see Sam. Anybody can make it back in time for a midnight kiss—when they want to. And I knew that Sam would.

  B.J. had a bittersweet voice slanting a little off-key, which she knew about and even admitted. It was no voice for making a living with. But always there was that wonderful way of strumming her words out, Southern but wiry, coated with a tease and followed by her laugh, that sounded delicious to me. But mainly, there was her way of moving—fluid, not tied-down like the rest of us. She seemed made of something that wasn’t skin, bone, muscle, or anything with limits. She could move like someone breaking through some invisible web, and yet at other times as easily and quietly as if her body were supported by air that no one else could feel. I sat beside Gill and we watched and laughed, then sat quietly, almost hypnotized, as B.J., with Ella playing and singing behind her, moved us through moods.

  Wearing her scarf like a cape—a cover of huge wings—twirling a red-striped beach umbrella and carrying a basket, B.J. came trotting onto the center of the floor. While Ella beat loud quick chords, B.J. set down her basket and spread out a beach towel the size of a wash cloth. Then she leaned back on her heels, and, in a second, moved forward, her face now as though inviting the whole room to share a secret while she sang. She and Ella traded verses: “Got off the train here at two-o-five. Caught the beat here ‘bout quarter to five.…”

  B.J.’s feet followed the rhythm along with Ella’s hands. And while Ella sang, B.J. tapped out the words and everyone laughed: “I got two left feet, but when we meet.…”

  They worked the room up into a hand-clapping love of motion with that honey-coated teasing that Ella and B.J. poured out together. They belted out the final chorus with such joy and fun that everyone seemed to be moving something: hands, feet, fingers, glasses on tabletops, each other.

  “Come on now. Just watch her. Move your feet. What’s that, sir?” B.J. teasingly cupped her ear with her hand while Ella pointed to B.J. and said, as everyone laughed, “T’ain’t her sister.” Then together: “Sweet rhythm of mine.”

  B.J. was the center. She was the star—at least at the Silver Moon. And for a while I had this nervous, dreading knot in my middle, waiting for her to do what I knew she would. But when she let her scarf fall, dancing in the fancy top of an imitation 1900s bathing suit with the insect-wing skirt still on, winding in the air as she moved, like the airborne tail of a child’s kite, I was hypnotized.

  She turned and lifted away the edge of her skirt and let it fall on the floor beside the piano. There were whistles and applause. While Ella’s fingers began running over the piano keys in a soft tune that settled into chords, B.J. reached into her basket and pulled out a huge bottle of suntan lotion and began oiling herself. A trumpet moaned up toward the ceiling in the long note of “Summertime,” and B.J.’s voice began, saying salty and straight the words she’d written herself:

  “The livin’ here ain’t easy. But I’m doin’ fine.” She winked.

  “Stayin’ down by the river in the hot summertime.

  “Fryin’ fish for supper, after I drop my line.” She pulled a midget-sized fishing pole out of her basket, dropped one sleeve off her shoulder as she cast her over-sized line close to the audience.

  “And if what I pull in, ain’t cookin’ size,

  “I don’t throw ’em back,

  “And I don’t criticize.

  “And if I get hot …” She twirled around. “I improvise.” She slipped out of the bloomers and gave a comic heave to the top of the strapless one-piece green suit she wore underneath. When the audience got quiet again, she said low:

  “I have a reputation for being … wise.”

  She danced some more, pretending to be sunning herself, rubbing on more oil and checking her fishing line. She turned her back, unzipped the bathing suit, and said over her shoulder:

  “And when I don’t get no bite.

  “I just spend the night.

  “ ’Cause when I fish, I do it right.” And untying the lacing that held the suit together so she could slip out of it easily, she picked up the umbrella, twirled it and twirled herself, showing the last and least of her costumes. Then she put the umbrella on her shoulder, slung out one hip and winked. “Now if you think I’ve been talkin’ about fishin’, I’d say, there’s a whole lot you’ve been missin’.” The trumpet blew up loud toward the ceiling and Ella began the final chorus of “Sweet Rhythm of Mine” again. B.J. danced and sang out the last words behind the twirling umbrella with her feet going wild beneath it and the place going crazy with applause and laughter.

  I turned around in my chair to look again for Sam. I saw Ron standing by the wall. He was watching B.J., and he didn’t look pleased. I could tell he was just about to explode with feeling so jealous; he was having to share her with everybody there. When I looked back at B.J., she was standing, wearing just about nothing, eating up the applause, loving it.

  No wonder Ron wanted her to leave Coldwater with him.

  The act was over when Ella beat out a few last chords and the trumpet sent out two golden notes like an apostrophe. Then B.J., surrounded with applause, smiled and reached out her arms—as I would always remember her.

  After a few minutes, B.J. ran off the dance floor into the hall. I pushed past everybody crowded around the door, intending to find B.J. and tell her how great I’d thought she’d been, but when I finally got past everybody, B.J. was gone. I looked in the dressing room and a few other places, but she must have hurried off somewhere with Ron. When I started back to Gill, the hall was empty. Ella was singing again and everybody had gone in to hear her. I was about halfway down the hall when two men came out of the men’s room in front of me and started strutting in my direction. They were sucking in their breaths and blowing them out and sort of chirping at me like all those roosters had done around my Elizabeth. Before I could move, one man put both arms over my shoulders beside my head and loosely pinned me to the wall. “What we got here?” he breathed.

  They were both drunk, smelling of liquor and blowing it all over me when they talked. “Off on a pass?” The other one laughed. I couldn’t tell if they were teasing, or if they really believed I was in the army. Ella’s voice sang in the opening at the end of the hall. The other man started running his hands around my chest and body and then the first one kissed me. All I could think about were the waxy lips made out of bubblegum that kids could buy at the dime store.

  I tried to step away but they were blocking me. “Easy, guys,” I said, fluffing my hair and wiping my mouth. Half of B.J.’s handiwork on my lips came off in my palm. I was breathing like a mule in the middle of a heat stroke. “I got to go in there a minute,” I said, smiling and nodding toward the door marked Dames.

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the other one said.

  They stepped back to let me move.

  Inside, I locked the door and dry-heaved into the toilet. Words I’d already heard from Toulouse were written all over the walls. I sat down on the closed toilet seat and tried to think. I could wait them out. After a while they’d leave, wouldn’t they? I ran over in my mind the way cowboys at the Ritz had avoided ambushes.

  After a f
ew minutes one of the guys banged on the door. “Come on, hon. We’re waitin’.”

  “I got a problem,” I yelled.

  “What?”

  “Can’t say. It’s personal.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “She’s fooling us,” the other one said. His voice was dark and thick.

  “I need a drink,” I yelled. “Can you bring me one from the bar?”

  “She’s stalling,” one said.

  They worked at the door latch. It was only a hook like the one on my grandparents’ screen door. I heard one of them walk around and go down the hall. In a few minutes a straightened-out coathanger came into the crack of the door and picked at the latch. My skin itched all over and I jumped up and stood on top of the commode. There was a small window high up on the wall.

  I could hear the faint sound of someone singing, her voice as high-pitched as a police siren. I knew it was Sue. I could hear catcalls and whistles, and I felt that in the next few seconds I would go crazy or stiff or never be found alive. I must have climbed the wall like a tree frog with suckers on his feet. I threw my legs out the high narrow window over the john and landed on the ground outside.

  I could hear the two men still calling for me. They were too drunk even to guide the coathanger right. They were pounding on the door, yelling. “We’re gonna wait,” one of them said. “Sure as hell are,” the other one yelled. “I like a good tease—but don’t get ridiculous!”

  I ran around to the front of the Silver Moon and with my heart beating like a gone-crazy drummer, I calmly walked past the man who was the bouncer and past the woman who checked hats. I nodded to both of them. They didn’t say a word about whether I had paid or anything. I guess there were advantages to looking like I did, for afterwards nobody forgot me. I walked into the main room just in time to hear Sue’s dying note and see her final twirl that left her wearing close to nothing. I stood at the back near the bar. There were lots of people standing up. I looked again for Sam. The smoke was thick, and the lights on Sue came through it in long white rays. I’d never felt so strong and slick. I was proud of myself. Those two men were probably still trying to pick the lock in the back of the Silver Moon and bust in on me. I stood waiting until the end of Sue’s act when I could walk back through the crowd to where I knew Gill was sitting.