Georgia Bottoms

by Mark Childress

  It felt so essential, so urgent to give this food to somebody. Maybe it was the idea of being so scared of burning that you would rather jump to your death from high in the air. On a day when that is happening, Georgia thought, I have this irrational need to be kind to somebody I don’t know. To help somebody.

  She parked in front of the ice machine at Hull’s Market. Yesterday’s Light-Pilot showed on the newspaper rack:

  HAWKS DEFEAT ELBA, 27–3

  Everything’s changed. Krystal said it. Seeing that innocent headline from yesterday, when the biggest news in town was the Six Points High football score—Georgia felt a pang of longing. That world was gone, vanished. Maybe forever. It hadn’t seemed all that sweet and innocent a place until the devil stuck out his tongue and laughed at us.

  Georgia got out of her car. How incredibly blue the sky was today, one of those unearthly Polaroid blues you get on the clearest autumn days. A beautiful day for a terrible thing. This would spoil all beautiful days for a while: guilt by association. Georgia wondered if the people who flew the planes into the buildings were thinking about that, if the glorious weather made their victory even sweeter as they smashed themselves to smithereens.

  Here came Madeline Roudy, pediatrician at the free county clinic, the most pleasant-faced of women, even today. In her crisp white blouse and tennis skirt, she had the unstudied glamour of a young Diahann Carroll or Leslie Uggams. Beautiful brown skin with a touch of cream.

  Georgia brightened. “Oh, Madeline,” she said, “just the person I’m looking for.”

  “Hello,” Madeline said.

  For a moment Georgia thought Madeline didn’t recognize her. Technically that was impossible; everybody in Six Points knew Georgia. “It’s Georgia,” she said, to be sure. “Georgia Bottoms?”

  “Oh yes, Georgia, of course, forgive me,” said Madeline Roudy. “I’m kind of distracted today.”

  There was no particular reason Madeline should recognize Georgia, though they had gone to high school together and had been friendly ever since, hadn’t they? Maybe the friendliness was only in Georgia’s head. She forged on.

  “Anyway, Madeline—nobody showed at my party, I’ve got all this food in my car and I wish you would take some of it. I can’t seem to give it away.” She made a comical face, an I Love Lucy bewilderment face to show what a ridiculous dilemma she had landed in, and to enlist Madeline’s help.

  Tugging down her oversized Jackie O sunglasses, Madeline stared at Georgia as if she was a crazy lady with too many cats. “I’m sorry?” she said in a voice so loud it actually rang the wire of the grocery buggies.

  “Imagine if you gave a luncheon and nobody came,” Georgia said. “I’ve got all this really nice food in my car, lobster, fancy salads and finger sandwiches, ready to go. If you wouldn’t mind taking some of it home. It would make me feel good, just to know it’s not all going to waste.”

  “Just keep it, and eat it yourself,” said Madeline Roudy.

  “Lord, I could never eat that much food in a year,” Georgia said.

  Dr. Roudy gave an impatient sigh. “Thank you, I can buy my own food,” she said. Her eyes flicked ahead to the door as if she was eager to go through it.

  Suddenly Georgia understood where she had gone wrong. “Oh Madeline, I get it. Of course I should have invited you to the luncheon, and I would have, too, but you don’t know my mother, the way she is about… politics.” Georgia was determined to straighten this out. She had always liked Madeline Roudy. She had always thought of Madeline as a friend, at least a possible friend.

  Madeline drew her body up in a straight line. “You think I wanted to come to your white-lady luncheon? Is that what you think?”

  “Oh my goodness. No! Madeline, you’re reading it all wrong, that’s not what I meant.” Good God, was she really that touchy? Georgia couldn’t offer a simple gift of food without her reading something racial into it? No wonder some people just give up trying to deal with these people—look where it gets you!

  “So I’m not good enough to be invited to your party,” Dr. Roudy was saying, “but you want to give me the food out the trunk of your car because nobody showed up? How pathetic do you think I am? God.”

  Georgia said, “Now wait a minute, you don’t have to get all huffy. The food is good, I made it myself. If you don’t want it, you could just say so.”

  “It’s a hell of a day for you to sit out here playing the great lady,” said Madeline Roudy. “Why don’t you take your damn lobster and go home?”

  Georgia was not used to being attacked in broad daylight. She groped for a proper response. “It’s a free country,” she said at last. “I don’t need your advice.”

  “And I sure as hell don’t need your lobster,” said Roudy in that bullhorn voice.

  “Okay, then, tell the whole world about it, then,” Georgia said, haughty as a fourth grader.

  Roudy put up her nose and marched on. The electric eye swept the door open. A gust of cool air flowed out as she went in.

  Georgia’s face stung as if she’d been slapped.

  Here came two more colored people the other way—two more black people, she corrected herself, two more African-American persons who might be poor or might just be wearing slovenly clothes because it’s their style, God forbid I should try to do something neighborly for anyone!

  Something charitable!

  Georgia let these black people walk right by her and her car full of wonderful food. There was enough to feed them and all their friends for a week. She let them walk on by.

  She climbed back in her car, cranked the A/C to MAX, and drove away from Hull’s Market.

  What she needed was a friend. What she needed right now, more than anything, was the comforting voice of a friend who would tell her she was right, or at least not that wrong.

  She drove once around the square. Krystal’s parking space at city hall was empty. Georgia parked and went in anyway.

  The radio hummed with news. Rhonda barely glanced up from the phone, “mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” making notes on a legal pad. At last she hung up. “Can I help you?”

  “Where’s Krystal?”

  “She was trying to call you before, but your mother said you’d gone off somewhere.”

  The whole world has turned against me, Georgia thought. Without Krystal in the room, Rhonda didn’t even bother to conceal her hostility.

  Georgia tried a smile. “She said y’all might need help answering the phone. Here I am. Just put me to work.”

  “I didn’t want your help, it was her,” Rhonda said. “She’s over at the water tower now, standing guard.”

  “Standing guard?”

  “The sheriff and his men are up at the dam. They didn’t have anybody to guard the water tower. So Krystal took a gun and went over there.”

  “Krystal has a gun?”

  Rhonda rolled her eyes. “Georgia, we’re really busy today.”

  Georgia stiffened. “Sorry to bother you. I’ll find her.”

  She marched out vowing to tell Krystal how Rhonda acted when she wasn’t around. Georgia had protected Rhonda long enough. One word from her and Krystal would fire her in an instant.

  God what a day! That sky so blue it made your eyes hurt!

  Rhonda was all emotional because of the news. She was taking it out on Georgia. Maybe it was a little extreme to think of getting her fired for acting snippy.

  Georgia just needed to talk to Krystal.

  The interior of her Civic was filled with the delicious humidity rising up from the food hampers. When she thought of the hours of chopping, mincing, and stirring, it made her want to weep. She put the car in gear, drove past the Kwik-M Mart, up Forrest Street to the little city park on the hill.

  Krystal’s forest-green Subaru wagon sat at the curb, sporting a faded Gore/Lieberman sticker and her GRRL MYR vanity plate.

  The slam of Georgia’s car door seemed loud enough to carry all the way to Montgomery. It was so quiet even the birds seemed to be waiting for
someone to speak.

  Georgia set off silently walking up the grassy slope, then realized that might not be the best idea, with Krystal armed and dangerous at the top.

  “Hey Krystal!” she cried. “It’s me, don’t shoot, I’m coming up there!” She whooped and hollered, raising such a racket that Krystal finally yelled at her to keep it down.

  Bathed in perspiration, snagging her panty hose on a blackberry bush, Georgia thrashed through the last stretch of steep woods. She popped through a wall of bushes to find Krystal in a webbed lawn chair, one foot propped against a concrete culvert at the foremost leg of the great silver water tower. She had come wearing one of her woolen mayoral suits, a maroon number that must have been unbearable in the heat. She’d hung the jacket on the stub of a pine branch and was airing out the sweat circles on her blouse. In the crook of her arm she cradled a double-barreled shotgun that looked taller than she was. “Damn, George, you trying to wake up all the babies from their naps?”

  “I didn’t want you to shoot me,” said Georgia. “I didn’t even know you could shoot a gun.”

  “I can if I have to,” said Krystal. “You didn’t bring a chair with you? Where you gonna sit?”

  “Nobody told me to bring any chair.” The word “Rhonda” was right there on Georgia’s tongue. It was hard not to say it.

  “Well I ain’t giving you my chair.”

  “I’ll stand,” Georgia said. “How long you planning to stay up here?”

  As long as necessary, Krystal said. Until Sheriff Allred sent somebody to relieve her. The portable radio at her feet emitted a low mutter of news, accompanied by the squawk of a police-band walkie-talkie.

  Georgia said, “Are you hungry at all?”

  “Only starving,” Krystal said. “I didn’t even get a cup of coffee this morning… it happened so fast. And then it just kept on happening.”

  “I can fix that. You wait right here.”

  On her way down the hill Georgia muttered curses against whoever invented the mid-heel pump. At the car she changed into an old pair of sneakers that had lived in the hatchback since she took that aerobics class.

  It’s a good thing she sprang for the pricey paper plates. Lesser plates would have wilted under the load she piled on. In the center of the food she wedged a pair of Lobster Scallion Shooters, still chilled from their ice bath.

  She stuffed plastic flatware and napkins in her purse, and headed up the slope with a plate awkwardly balanced in each hand. It didn’t exactly make her Mother Teresa, but she was glad some of her food would be eaten and appreciated by someone she loved.

  “Dear God,” Krystal said when she saw the heaped-up plate, “I thought you was bringing a pack of crackers. What is this, Gourmet magazine?”

  Georgia described how she had driven all over Six Points trying to give the food away. She left out the part about hateful Rhonda, but otherwise gave as objective an account as she could, considering it had happened to her. She told about Sharon Overby at the nursing home and Madeline Roudy at Hull’s Market.

  Krystal laid the shotgun on the cement slab, and dug into the Fresh Mountain Apple Jell-O Compote. They ate standing up with the chair between them as a picnic table. “Now that is good eatin’,” Krystal said. “Maybe Madeline didn’t understand what you were trying to do. Maybe she thought you were trying to give her charity or something.”

  “I distinctly told her it wasn’t. I explained the whole thing.”

  “But you didn’t invite her to the lunch, so maybe that’s how it felt—to her, I mean. Can’t you see where it might?”

  “Oh now, you’re not going to take her side?” Georgia cried. “Please don’t. I can’t stand it if you do.”

  “Hey, you asked my honest opinion,” said Krystal. “If you want bullshit, you better talk to somebody else.”

  True enough. “So what should I have said?”

  “George, you’re upset. Tomorrow, you call her and tell her you didn’t mean anything.”

  “Me apologize to her?” Georgia shook her head. “I’m not the one who was incredibly rude!”

  “Maybe she was upset too. We’re all upset today, Georgia. It’s a bad day.”

  “Oh shut up!” Georgia cried. “I don’t care about that. I’m already sick to death of it! It didn’t happen to anybody we know. It doesn’t have anything to do with us! But now everything’s ruined, and I swear I could just—God damn it!” A wave of frustration crashed over her. She hurled the plate with all her strength, spattering food on the bushes. The votive candleholders caromed across the gravel, spitting lobster and red sauce.

  Krystal put her plate out of Georgia’s reach, and turned with open arms. “Come give us a hug.”

  Georgia said, “I don’t want a hug.”

  “Sure you do. Everybody wants a hug.”

  “Not me,” said Georgia. She didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to feel just this bad.

  “Fine.” Krystal turned up her hands. “No hug for you then. Go pick up your goddamn plate. That’s littering.”

  “Oh would you shut up!” Georgia burst into tears.

  Krystal kept eating, watching Georgia out of the corner of her eye. At last she said, “I only tried to hug you. Jeez.”

  “I know,” Georgia said. “I appreciate it, I really do.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know,” Georgia said. “Just let me be. I’m almost done.”

  “Okay,” said Krystal. “I swear to God. You are such a mess.”

  7

  After a long afternoon standing guard with Krystal, Georgia arrived home to find the house peaceful, quiet, and clean, the last load of dishes sloshing and clanking in the dishwasher, all the platters washed, dried, and stacked on the counters to be put away. Someone had swooped in to perform this magic while Georgia was gone, like Snow White cleaning up for the dwarfs. She understood why the dwarfs were not all that happy about it: it’s alarming to come home and find your house has been cleaned by invisible hands.

  She found Little Mama tucked in bed, working the same old crossword puzzle.

  “Mama, what did you do? I was going to clean up but you’ve done it all.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Little Mama. “That was your brother.”

  After all these years of being waited on hand and foot, Brother apparently had been inspired by the news on TV to try to make all his amends in one afternoon. Mama said his conversion was something to see. Georgia wished she’d been there to see it. He had washed dishes, mopped floors, moved furniture, rolled out the rugs, vacuumed, and dusted until the whole downstairs was shiny clean.

  Every once in a while Brother experienced one of these bursts of contrition, usually after a worse-than-usual hangover, his bad acts crashing down around him in a wave. Brother meant well, in short stretches. He didn’t seem capable of meaning well for more than two days in a row.

  The AA people told him not to bother coming to meetings if he was only going to go out afterward and get drunk.

  His parole officer sent him back to jail for a month to put the fear of God into him, but all it did was make him mad and a little crazier. The first thing he did when they let him out was cut off his hair—he shaved his head with a dog clipper he borrowed from his girlfriend Trish (whose name, Georgia thought, was off by one letter). Without hair, Brother announced that he was a punk rocker, then a cancer patient, then Lex Luthor in Superman. A neo-Nazi. A Jew in a concentration camp. He “tattooed” a number on his arm with a Sharpie. He drew zigzag hair on his naked skull. When his real hair grew in, he dyed stripes in it and announced that he was an artist.

  For a while he spent his afternoons on the washing-machine porch making crazy oil paintings with too much color dripping off the sides. Georgia actually encouraged that phase. Oil paint was messy and expensive, but much less flammable than whiskey. For a few weeks, painting seemed to keep Brother out of trouble.

  Just when he seemed to be getting better, he fell into an obsession with R
oy Moore, a judge in Montgomery who was engaged in a noisy battle over his God-given constitutional right to display the Ten Commandments in the headquarters building of the Alabama Supreme Court. Moore had his eye on the governor’s mansion; he thought he could become the next George Wallace by riding the Ten Commandments to the statehouse, as Wallace had ridden segregation.

  Like all true fanatics, Roy Moore had the courage of his convictions. He raised funds for a block of marble the size of a Hammond organ, engraved the Ten Commandments on its face, had it installed in the lobby of the supreme court under cover of darkness, and dared anyone to remove it. Then he went on a speechmaking tour, trying to stir up the old Wallace magic among the God-fearing citizens of rural Alabama.

  Brother taped newspaper clippings about the case all over the walls of his room. He stayed up all night recording long anti-Moore manifestos into a cassette recorder. The next day he would listen back to the tape on his earphones, furiously taking notes, as if he was learning important things from himself.

  It got worse after Sims Bailey drove him to Evergreen to see Roy Moore give a speech. Brother came back convinced that Roy Moore was the literal Antichrist. “He’s doing the work of Satan by claiming to represent God’s will in court,” Brother said. “He has built a graven idol and placed it in the public square to be worshipped. Don’t you see, it’s straight out of the Old Testament! Do you know what ‘graven’ means?—engraved! He’s got people all over the country worshipping a piece of marble. Somebody’s got to stop him.”

  “You don’t seriously think that means you,” Georgia said, but yes, he did think that. Brother, who had never had a religious bone in his body.

  Georgia didn’t know what to do. If she ignored what was happening, it would get worse—and she would still have to clean it up later.

  She sat Brother down for a talk. They both cried. Little Mama came in and cried too. Brother declared he would move out and get his own place, a job, a new start, really try to make a go of it this time. He talked like that for a couple of days, then let it drop.