by Charles Rose
Teejay was sitting out on the porch swing, watching the traffic go by. It was his house now, not Willie Banks’s house. Hammers—one after the other, two at once, four at a time—were whacking brads into shingles. Big black men and little white men were laddered against the sloping roof. Their flatbed truck was parked behind his pickup. Rotten shingles were stacked between the pecan tree and a tall clump of sun-browned pampas grass. Teejay had a mattress in his pickup and a floor lamp and two table lamps, Samantha’s kitchen chairs, a small ice chest, a hot plate, his mother’s television set. He hadn’t turned off the utilities yet even though he hadn’t any way of paying for them. He hadn’t asked Samantha to pay the bills for him.
He’d gone back to Samantha, slept with her on her brass bed, their love cries echoing in his mind. Teejay honey. Oh Samantha! So why had she come down on him? You can do what you like with your tacky old house. You can turn it into a museum and live there the rest of your natural life.
He’d tried to tell her he wasn’t doing that. He would live there until the house was sold. He would move back to Pensacola and find a place of his own after that, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t see each other. But he wasn’t about to be a kept man.
Kept, you think I want to keep you. You’re the one who asked me for money.
Someone must have let Lori Torbert know he was here because around noon she showed up in her Nissan Sentra.
The roofers were off on their lunch break. Teejay made room for Lori on the porch swing. He had to put his feet on the porch to keep the swing from rocking.
“I see,” Lori said, “you’re putting on a new roof.”
“That’s right. That’s what I’m doing.” He felt Lori’s arm brush his elbow. “And that’s not all. I’m moving in. I’m going to stay here until you sell the house. I got a mattress and some kitchen chairs in my truck and some other things I need to live here. I’m serious. Here’s where I intend to stay until you sell this place.”
“You’ll have to move your things out when I show the house.”
“I can do that,” Teejay said. “I can move them out to my truck.” He rocked the porch swing just a little, and she put out her feet and stopped it.
“You are actually going to live here?”
“Sure am. I have to live somewhere,” he said.
“I know but I may not sell your house for awhile. I think you should be reasonable and find a place to live in Pensacola.”
“I had a place in Pensacola,” he said, “but that place is no longer available.”
He looked away from the stacks of shingles, the ladders, the passing cars and trucks, shutting Samantha out of his mind. He eased his body close to Lori Torbert’s, kept his eyes glued to hers.
“Could I ask about you something personal, Lori?”
“Some things I’d rather you didn’t ask.”
“I’m not prying into your personal life. I just want you to know why I moved out from the place I was in, that’s all.” He’d been living, he told Lori, with an older woman who was supporting him. He found the words he wanted to say next without looking very hard for them. “What I’m asking you is would you live with an older man if he were your sole means of support?”
“I’m my own sole means of support,” she said. “I sell real estate. I get along.”
He felt the porch swing move a little, aware that both of them were moving it. “Supposing you met an older man who owned a Cadillac Deville.”
He touched Lori’s instep with the toe of a boot, and she giggled, rocking the swing. “Who wants a Cadillac Deville?”
“If I stayed with this woman I’ve been living with I know I might be driving one someday.”
“I wouldn’t want you to give up a Cadillac.”
“I wouldn’t want to either but I might.”
Lori put out a long leg to stop the swing, looking out at the traffic, controlling her voice so it sounded like how she was on the telephone, her bright blue eyes boring into his. “Why don’t you come to my house tonight? I’ll cook dinner for you and we’ll watch a video.”
“I wouldn’t want you to cook dinner for me. But I will watch a video with you.”
That night they ordered takeout Chinese. He let Lori pay her half of the bill. She poured out Chablis in long-stemmed wine glasses, and when the video started she refilled them. They held hands, watching the video, and then he put his arm around her, dropping his fingers to her breasts. She took his hand and let him fondle her breasts. Her lips fluttered when he kissed her.
Later, still drinking Chablis, she turned on her side and showed him the strawberry birthmark high up on her left buttock. “When I was a little girl my mom told me it would go away. But like a lot of things it didn’t go away.”
“I won’t be going away until you sell my house.”
“Well maybe I never will sell your house.”
The next night he was back at Lori’s place. They drank a pitcher of margaritas. She pointed out the antique furniture she had from her grandmother, really nice things, she said, a tea table with a marble top, a bonnet table with a drawer for gloves, a hall tree in glossy golden oak. She sat up on the carpet, swept one hand toward the hall tree. “That bastard I was married to tried to talk me out of the hall tree.”
“What would he want with a hall tree?”
“He’s renovating an old house in Pensacola. He says the hall tree is rightfully his because he was the one who refinished it. That’s how Bill determines ownership.”
There were photographs in her bedroom—she must have a big family, he thought—and a framed Cantonment High School diploma. She showed him her majorette photograph. She was in it with six other girls, kneeling in front of a drum major. He liked Lori as a majorette. He was sorry he hadn’t gotten to know her then.
The next time he was with her they drank another pitcher of margaritas. Waking up in the middle of the night, he reached out to the woman beside him. Samantha, he heard himself saying. Lori turned over on her side. She didn’t say anything to him, but when he touched her strawberry birthmark she grabbed his hand and shoved it away. He got up and went to the bathroom, and when he came out Lori was asleep. Or faking it, he couldn’t tell which. He put his clothes on, and said goodbye to the hall tree.
Lori called him several days later. She was spending the day in Pensacola; she would come by his place when she got back. “I’ve got news for you, Teejay,” she said. “Someone is interested in buying your house.” But by nine o’clock Lori still hadn’t shown up. He thought of going to see Lori at her place; then the Nissan pulled into the driveway and Lori was at his front door.
He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away. “I’m showing the house tomorrow at ten. So you need to be out of here. I came over tonight to tell you because you need to clean up the place.”
“Out? I live here.”
He nudged a beer can with his foot, and went up to her and put his hands out. She took one of his hands in both of hers. “It’s not that I don’t want to see you, Teejay, but right now isn’t a good time. We can see each other after I sell your house.”
She let him kiss her before she left him. He stood out on the porch for awhile, watching the traffic go by. He didn’t want to go back inside the house right away. Lori Torbert was like the other girls he’d known. She probably would have made life miserable for him. The first girl he’d had sex with, he’d taken her to a high school football game. He’d had her in the back seat of his father’s car. When he got back home, there was a light on in the bay window. His mother and Willie were dancing. His mother’s hands were locked behind Willie’s neck. Teejay had driven around the block several times. They must have heard him pull out of the driveway because when he got back the lights were out all over the house.
He swept up the kitchen and took the garbage out. He loaded his things on the pickup, the floor lamp and table lamps, the
kitchen chairs, the hot plate and the ice chest, his mother’s television set. The wedding photograph he put in the glove compartment.
He stayed in a motel in Cantonment, across the highway from Kentucky Fried, and the next day he sat in his room until ten, watching game shows and talk shows, as his mother had done for so many years. He got in the pickup at ten-fifteen and headed back to his house. He drove by the brown and beige Cadillac Deville parked behind the Nissan Sentra. Now he knew who was being shown his house. He gassed up at a full-service station, had the oil checked, the windshield cleaned. Returning, he passed his house again. The Cadillac Deville must be on its way back to wherever Samantha’s daddy had come from.
Hugh Deen was in his office waiting for him. He was half a foot shorter than Lori Torbert, an old guy she couldn’t be interested in. Hugh Deen told him Lori Torbert had gone home early today. She was going on vacation tomorrow and she wanted to get started packing. Hugh Deen had the earnest money for the house. He counted out fifteen crisp one-hundred dollar bills, and handed them over to Teejay.
It started raining when Teejay got to Samantha’s. Drops of rain puckered the white sand along the narrow road that led to the bay. He left his earnest money in the glove compartment, put a tarpaulin over his things in the truck. He wiped his shoes off on the throw rug by the door so he wouldn’t track up the living room. A still life set up on the coffee table, double-blossomed camellias in the long-necked vase. He moved quietly through the big dining room to the kitchen. Samantha was washing romaine lettuce, patting each beaded leaf dry, folding wet lettuce up in a towel.
It rained on into the afternoon. They made love in Samantha’s room, on her brass bed. Teejay honey! Oh Samantha! She had to ask him do you love me? He heard himself saying, “I do, Samantha,” rain drumming on their storm-tight roof.
Cutouts
He had driven by an auto graveyard one day and seen the school bus and bought it. He’d put used tires on the rear wheels and had it towed to his daddy’s house. He’d taken the seats out, cut a section out of the roof, installed a glass-paneled bubble like the raised glass roof of an observation car so his mother could look up at the sky at night, relive long-ago Union Pacific ads when her mother had been a little girl, move backward in time, not forward, recover people sitting in comfortable chairs, writing letters, reading magazines, the sky overhead, clouds and birds, the sun and the moon and the stars. If they followed a straight line west from the school bus, along the Sno-Cone sign to his daddy’s house, it would take them to her hospital bed, the feeding tube in her navel, the drainage machine squatting robot-like on the tasseled, unvacuumed throw rugs, ever ready for sucking mucus out of her throat (to do that he inserted a tube in her mouth, laid his hand carefully over her nose, the machine humming, the level rising in the plastic container Ray would detach, empty out in the toilet, soak in vinegar, replace carefully), the radio on, the tiny school bus cutout he’d made for her on her vanity for her to take comfort in. With the curtains open she could turn her head, see her big bus in the backyard. Day and night she would know she could go there, lie down, look up.
The little buses were set up in his trailer workshop, at one end of the bedroom/kitchen area, a sheet of plywood spanning drain board and stove, his plywood school bus cutouts hand-painted with tiny red lights, a tiny hexagonal stop sign jutting off the driver’s side to the left. Ray had laid plywood out, painted in streets, erected shoebox public buildings, schoolhouse, jail, courthouse, bank. His mother, Mabel Rackstraw, his dear mother would be behind the wheel, with a big smile, color in her cheeks, her eyes on the road, not on him. Little Ray would be sitting five seats back from her.
Nothing happened to Ray or his mother while they were inside the bus. The school bus door would stay locked because the key to his daddy’s car didn’t fit. Hurry up Ray we have to catch the bus. His daddy would pound on the school bus door and his mother held little Ray in her arms until his daddy went back into the house. She’d say your daddy’s trying to do better. And when his daddy did do better, Ray still had his hiding place under the steering wheel.
Ray Rackstraw’s school bus, his trailer workshop where he made a living as a sign painter, the Sno-Cone sign and his panel truck took up the sixty-by-ninety-foot backyard that his daddy had let him live on free as long as his mother was alive. Lying in bed with Flo Mayfield’s hand in his—she had come all the way back from Portland, Oregon, to be with him after his mother died—he would imagine the school bus floating through space. Hang on, Flo, he’d say to Flo, but by this time Flo would be sound asleep. Sleep on, Flo, he would say to her, and lightly kiss her on the forehead.
Sitting out in front of his trailer workshop late one afternoon in September, Ray heard Mason Rackstraw’s car in the drive, heard him slam the front door. Mason Rackstraw must have had a bad day selling burial policies, or heard from Chief Cosgrave, or both. A pecan leaf lit on his daddy’s bald head; his daddy swatted it like a mosquito. His coin changer still clamped to his belt, his rate books and ballpoint pens hedging the pockets of his shirt, he stood over Ray like he owned him, thumping his fist in his open left hand the way he did when Ray was a little boy.
“I’m going to give it to you straight, Ray. I received another call from Chief Cosgrave today. He’s getting complaints from the neighbors about the way you choose to live your life. He wants that bus out of here quick, and you with it, and that woman of yours.” The law is the law, his daddy made clear. No vehicle can be used as a dwelling place within the city limits of Ott. Ray got up, looking down at his daddy’s bald head. His daddy stopped thumping his fists, his voice lapsing into a whiny surliness. “We could both of us go to jail for what you’ve taken a notion to do. You find you another place to live, Chief Cosgrave might just cut you some slack.”
Ray was picketing. Marching up the long hill to the city building, Ray passed people on their way to lunch. He had left Flo in the school bus. She wanted nothing to do with his picketing. Flo Mayfield wanted no part of it.
Approaching motorists and pedestrians would read the message on Ray’s sandwich boards—a man’s home is his castle. At the top of the hill, the straps cutting into his shoulders, Ray stopped for a drink from the water fountain between the city building and the library. In motion again, he passed police station, library, city building, passing people who looked right past him as if they’d rather he packed up and left town, went back to Portland like Flo wanted him to.
Chief Cosgrave came out of the police station. He gave Ray his Jolly Green Giant grin and laid the law down for Ray to knuckle under to. “I assume you are aware that you need a permit for picketing.”
Ray had one, from the city of Ott, signed by the mayor himself. He showed the permit to the chief.
“Picketing’s legal. I have a permit.”
“Using a school bus for purposes of habitation isn’t legal. Not inside the city limits.”
“My hearing is set for November fifteenth. I can keep my school bus where it is until Judge Popwell hands down a ruling.”
“What you’ll get is thirty days minimum. But if you do what I’m asking you to do, I’ll see that you don’t go to jail. You do it today, you won’t even be fined. I’ll tell Judge Popwell you made a mistake.” Two Brinks guards came out of Eagle Bank, looking warily up and down the street. One was a woman guard. brinks showed on the back of her jacket. “Here’s what I’m going to tell Judge Popwell, if you’re willing to cooperate. ‘Your honor, Ray Rackstraw isn’t like ordinary folks. He didn’t know he was violating the law. He’s a weirdo who lives in his own world.’”
Ray couldn’t take much more of this. The chief had to hear his side of it. “I’m a sign painter, not a weirdo. Sign painting is my profession. And my world is as good as yours.”
The chief had his Jolly Green Giant grin on, and his voice, it wasn’t a midget’s voice. “Let me tell you something, Rackstraw. I’m willing to let you live your life any way you choose t
o live it. But not inside the city limits. You get your daddy to buy you some land outside the city limits. You move your school bus out of the city. Is that clear? Do you read me?”
Ray looked past the chief at the jail. He heard a steel door slamming, but he didn’t flinch. He said his school bus would stay where it was. And he wasn’t about to stop picketing.
Soon Ray was attracting attention. People gathered around the city building to watch Ray do his picketing. A school bus driver put on the brakes. He gawked at Ray in his sandwich boards. The red stop lights blinked, and the arm with the hexagonal stop shot out from the driver’s side.
One morning in early October, just after Ray had gone off to do his picketing, Chief Cosgrave paid Flo Mayfield a visit. Chief Cosgrave took his time getting out of the patrol car. Flo watched the chief move around the Sno-Cone sign. He was coming her way, a big thumb hooked in his thick black belt, and for a minute she thought he might blow his whistle at her.
Chief Cosgrave sat down up front in the bus, across the narrow aisle from Flo’s crossed legs. “I thought talking to you might do Ray some good. You’re his woman; you must have some influence over him.”
“I do, but not about this,” Flo said. “Ray’s not going to change his mind. He won’t do that. That’s how he is.”
The chief unhooked his thumbs from his gun belt. “Let me tell you something about myself. I’ve never lived in a school bus. I don’t live with a woman who isn’t my wife. We have two bathrooms in our home. We have a kitchen and three bedrooms, a television set in our living room, a washer and dryer, and more. We’re a couple. We obey the law. We don’t go picket the city whenever something the city happens to do doesn’t fit in with our lifestyle.”