by test
"Did they comb your hair this morning?" Maydean asks. She stands over her mother and examines her white curls.
"I reckon they did," Bertie says, looking up sheepishly.
"I don't believe they did," Maydean says, and takes a pink-handled lift from her purse. "It's flat in the back where you've slept on it." With the pick, she lifts Bertie's hair away from her scalp. "I know they didn't comb it," she says to Adrienne. "I came over here last Wednesday and she had her dress on backwards." She raises her hands as if to say she knows she is helpless in the matter. "I guess some days they're shorthanded.''
The room smells freshly painted and papered, but is hot even though air conditioning spills from a grill beside the window. Adrienne thinks if she does not get out, she will faint or throw up. She sits for a moment on Bertie's bedspread, which matches the sofa, but the rest does not help her. She moves toward what looks like a bathroom door. "Is this the bathroom?" she asks Maydean.
"Yes," Maydean says. "Are you sick?"
"No," Adrienne says. "I think I ate too much." She closes the door behind her. She feels the way she thinks Maydean might have felt if Bertie had ever accused her of smoking. Maydean wouldn't have known what to do next, except maybe quit, and that wouldn't have been any fun.
The fluorescent light in Bertie's bathroom is so bright Adrienne switches it off. On the toilet, the lid down, she closes her eyes and sees the house, gutted now. Clapboard pulled from beneath the upstairs windows litters the flat porch roof. Windowless holes gape. Layers of stripped wallpaper on a back wall shine through the massive cracks. Last night when they went to see it, the house was only dark. Otherwise, nothing had been touched. This stripped-down version must have been her dream. Maybe in the dream she had been in the house and walked from room to room, pulled off a shred of paper herself, or kicked loose a slate tile from the front hall floor. In the kitchen she sees herself open a cabinet door and find a shot glass, plain except for a band of square etching, like faggoting on the hem of a linen pillowcase. She pockets the glass as she leaves.
Adrienne rises, runs cold water, and splashes some on her face. The water dampens her hair and drips from her chin as she reaches for a paper towel. In a moment, she will go out and tell her mother she has to return to Nashville. She and Mark will visit shortly, she will say. She is not sick at all; she has deft-
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nitely eaten too much buffet and will be fine as soon as her lunch settles. She will say good-bye to Bertie and in all likelihood not visit her again. Somehow visiting her now is like watching somebody sleep without their permission, when they are defenseless; it just doesn't seem fair. Adrienne drops her paper towel in the wastebasket and opens the door.
Maydean senses Adrienne is ready to leave and gets up from the sofa beside Bertie. "It was good to see you," she says, and hugs Adrienne. "I'm excited about your friend. Maybe he'll come home with you next time."
"We'll see," Adrienne says. She pulls back, surprised at how thin Maydean's shoulders feel.
"Is something the matter?" Maydean asks.
"No," Adrienne says. "Still trying to remember that dream about the house."
"Why don't you drive by there," Maydean says. "Maybe if you see the house, you'll remember. Besides, you may never get to see it again."
"That's true," Adrienne says, but she knows she won't drive by.
"What house are y'all talking about?" Bertie asks.
"Just a house we drove by yesterday." Maydean's eyes redden.
"I gotta go," Adrienne says, backing toward the door.
Maydean follows her and stands there as Adrienne walks down the hall.
"Don't drive too fast," Maydean calls.
"I won't," Adrienne says, and steps into the sunny parking lot. She is wearing high heels with her linen dress and as she strides toward her car, she wishes she did not feel so tall.
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Hardware Man
by Tim Parrish
I was the highest-paid hardware man in Baton Rouge. Seven bucks an hour. Doesn't sound like squat, but in the Red Stick hardware war I was big gun. Five years I worked at Leenks. "LeenksYour Hardware Connection." I started there a month after Allied Chemical fired me, two months after my girlfriend of nine years, kind of my second wife, told me to pack. During those first days I snorted coke on the loading dock just to get through but even then ! was good. I only sold people what they needed, and I showed them how to use it. No bullshit. Eight people worked there when I started. On December 24, 1989, when we closed the doors on our mulch and bolts for the last time, only me and the owners, Rodney and Patsy Leenk, were left.
We'd planned to have a close-out party, a slow last morning while we helped an Xmas customer or two, but a record arctic front busted half the pipes in town and flooded us with customers, especially dumbasses that didn't know pipe from their own arms. The store was cold as a refrigerator coil, and my daddy, who came into town for the party, had on a thick, brown coat lined with fake sheep's wool and jeans that hung loose like his legs were dowel sticks. Earlier Rodney had walked up to me and said, "Shoplifting time, Bob," meaning I could have anything I really wanted, and every few minutes Daddy checked out some new feature on the Swiss Army knife I'd salvaged for him. Over in the electrical section, I caught him looking through the magnifying glass at colored light bulbs, then in the garden tools department he had the little scissors out clipping his fingernails. That afternoon Daddy and I'd be traveling to Galveston to see my younger brother, Jeb, my first time to see him since Momma's funeral.
It was almost noon, and I had this brunette holding a piece of PVC pipe while I showed her how to wrap tape on the threads, her slender fingers almost touching mine as she nodded and smiled, flirting back, but Patsy and Rodney walked up with these stricken faces that told me this was our last customer, and I wanted to hurry and finish the sale before a wad clogged my throat. I'd just gathered the pipe and tape when the plate glass window at the storefront shattered into a million pieces and a blast slapped me square in the face. Next thing I was in a tunnel, darkness and flashes and footsteps, and then I was running toward where Daddy had been standing. The freezing wind hit me like a cluster of tiny nails, and right when I saw Daddy stand, a second explosion quaked the
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store so bad fluorescent tubes, cans of spray paint, and rakes fell into the aisles, clattering and exploding like small arms' fire.
"You all right?" Daddy yelled, coming down the aisle towards where I was crouched. I nodded back, embarrassed.
"Exxon must're blown," he said, meaning the refinery about a quarter mile away. "Guess the cold weather messed up the pressure in their pipes. Well, I'll be. Look at that."
In the parking lot, it was snowing black, chunks of insulation floating down from the sky. I glanced around and saw everybody else standing unhurt. "You okay, Daddy?" I asked.
He put his hands up to the sides of his head. "My ears is ringing. That's all."
The five of us crunched over the glass at the front and looked into the distance where fire rolled on the horizon, splotching the cold blue with black smoke.
"Damn that looks bad," Rodney said. Daddy nodded. While I was in Vietnam, Daddy's plant blew an hour before he was supposed to go to work. The brunette looked at me in a way that told me I was pale green. On a normal day I'd have already had her phone number. I excused myself. On the way to the back I tried lighting a cigarette but I couldn't get the match to be still. I wouldn't be walking these aisles anymore. My mother was gone. I didn't know what I'd be doing.
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My brother Jeb and I were in the room when Momma died. Her lupus had given her a heart attack, and for two weeks she'd fought a coma, finally slipping in four days before she went. Jeb dabbed her lips with a wet cloth, the thing he'd done every time he was in the room. Earlier she'd moved her mouth like she was trying to suckle, but now she struggled just to breathe while I rubbed her feet with lotion and tried to shut out Jeb's telling her
that Daddy had gone to the cafeteria with their relatives. It sounded like Jeb was talking to a child.
When she went she took one last deep breath like she was ready to rest. Jeb and I each held a hand and yelled, "Good-bye, Momma. I love you. I'll miss you," so loud a nurse came. Neither of us cried because we were tired, too. Then the room filled up with her, and it was like she was hugging me all over at once, and I saw red lights dancing outside the window, Momma saying good-bye back. I walked over and watched the lights lift into the sky, pause above my apartment across the street, spread out and disappear.
When I turned around, Jeb was sitting in a chair next to the bed still holding her hand. I told him what I'd seen, and he just gave me that "Right, sure" look he's so good at. We had the thermostat low to offset Momma's fever, and I shivered, everything metal-and-linoleum cold, knowing Jeb was going to sit there and hold her hand until the last bit of warmth left her, as if her body, that
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thing that had let her down, still had something to do with her. I waited in the hall. When I heard the squeak of gurney wheels, I told Jeb it was time to go.
In the cafeteria Daddy and the others were paying the bill and laughing at some joke, but when we came through the door, Daddy threw his toothpick on the ground. Jeb and I each put an arm around him and walked him out, and in the elevator Jeb told exactly what had happened using that official collegeteacher's voice he uses when he acts like he's Daddy's daddy. I watched the floor numbers tick higher and pictured Momma's lights zooming past the moon, weaving through asteroids, skimming the rings of Saturn, and heading towards burning white Alpha Centauri.
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After the explosion, Rodney, Daddy, and I boarded up the broken window. When we finished I hugged Rodney and Patsy, and they told me to keep in touch, but we all knew we wouldn't. The store made us a family. Without it we weren't. Rodney and Patsy took off, then I got a broom from the loading dock and started sweeping insulation on the parking lot into black mounds. Daddy opened his car door and turned the news channel up loud. Out of Romania come estimates of twelve thousand dead, the report said as Daddy watched fire swell the oily cloud over Exxon. The air stank like gasoline and for some reason I thought of the black Martian gas in War of the Worlds, a book Jeb had sent me in Nam.
"You put in applications anywhere yet?" Daddy asked.
"The store just closed, Daddy."
"You known about it for a month."
"I'll get unemployment. I'm going to take some time off. I want to go see Teddy."
Teddy's my son. He lives with his mother, my real ex-wife, and her family outside Soso, Mississippi.
American soldiers are playing heavy metal music hoping to drive General Noriega out of hiding in the Vatician compound.
"Who would've thought all the stuff that's happened this year would've happened," I said.
"Hard to believe what all I seen," Daddy said. "The Depression, World War II, communist thugs getting back what they gave. The world's finally turning."
Automatic weapons fire crackled from a live report. I imagined Teddy in fatigues, standing with an M-16 at some checkpoint. I was glad he was only fifteen. I said, "Thank God I could do my part to stem the Red threat."
Daddy twisted the corner of his mouth.
"Lots of men had to fight in wars, Bob. I fought mine."
"Yours wasn't total bullshit politics."
"Every war's politics."
"Not like mine."
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"You mostly worked in a hospital. You could've had it worse." Daddy walked next door in front of the Radio Shack where a thirty-foot inflatable snowman stood. He tugged one of the guy wires, wobbling the promo balloon. I wished I hadn't mentioned Nam. Like everything else, the wars we'd been in was something we couldn't share. I'd never been able to tell him what had gone on with me, and he'd never been willing to tell me what had gone on with him. He told Jeb about being on Midway when the Japanese fleet passed in 1943 and about being in the first fleet to enter Nagasaki after the Bomb, but all he'd ever said to me was, "I was just a SeaBee, trying not to let my hammer get rusty." When I told Jeb I wished Daddy talked to me like he talked to him, Jeb said, "You blame him for your going to Nam, and he blames you for blaming him. What do you expect?''
I started using a piece of cardboard as a dustpan, and Daddy came back to help. Record cold temperatures again tonight as the Siberian Express continues to travel through the South. TV pictures the night before had shown cars sliding on slush in New Orleans and palm trees thrashing in snow.
"Interstate over the Atchafalaya might be froze," Daddy said. "I don't remember it being this cold since right after Winona and me come here."
"Ain't it strange how it's all happening this year?" I said. "The Iron Curtain coming down and the cold front and then that explosion today. I bet Momma's getting a kick out of everything being crazy since she's gone."
Daddy stood and worked his knee like a hinge until it popped, then went off toward the dumpster, carrying the platter of black insulation. I rested my chin on the end of the broom. My hands were numb, the tip of my nose gone. A small explosion rolled like artillery. The sirens seemed like they'd never quit.
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This was my war: On the flight to Nam, the pilot came on the intercom and told us if we looked out the window to the right we'd see Apollo 13, the moon shot that got crippled in space, parachuting down. We all crowded over to one side, pressing together and sweating, trying to get our faces close to these little windows, but all we saw was sky and sea. Then the pilot comes on again, real sheepish, and tells us he screwed up, we missed it because he was sitting backwards in the navigator's chair and should have told us to look out the left side.
In Nam I was stationed at Chu Lai. I went out on patrols but mostly I was an orderly and put people and parts in bags. When I had five days left, this fire base not far from us got overrun. They choppered the bodies, about two hundred Americans, back to this air-conditioned warehouse and laid them out until me and three other guys could go over and bag them. Cambodia was on, so we were busy and didn't get to the warehouse until afternoon. It was dark in there after being in the sun, and quiet except for the AC's hum, so we stopped inside the door. When we flicked a switch, banks of fluorescent lights blinked a couple
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of times before buzzing on. And there they were. All two hundred of those dead fuckers, their muscles contracted, sitting up in neat rows, waiting for us. I turned around and walked back to the CO's office.
"I quit," I said.
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The ditches next to the interstate were frozen hard as concrete, but the road had thawed. In the median a tractor-trailer rig had crashed, throwing its load of pipes in heaps except for a couple that had jabbed the ground and angled like turrets. The sky shone deep blue. A pale crescent moon ran away from the sun. A daylight moon spooks me because it's something out of place, like the cold weather, like when Halley's Comet drew all the crazies out of hiding and into the store. Jeb thinks I'm full of shit for watching the sky, but what's happening there fucks with people's heads. If the moon can pull the ocean, it can tilt a brain.
"I hear they're opening a new plant down around St. Gabriel," Daddy said.
"Yeah, and they'll be hiring twenty-two-year-olds to be operators."
"You don't know that. You won't get it unless you try."
"I don't want to work in a plant again, Daddy. All those chemicals at Allied made me sick."
"You should've never lost that job. If you'd learn how to keep your mouth closed."