Miss Phipps picked up the deck and let out a girlish squeal. Serious had been so distracted by the Sunday School Stalker and Miss Delaney’s unexpected gesture that he had accidentally wasted his queen. He took it good-naturedly, patting Miss Phipps on the back, glad to see her enjoying a moment of pure happiness.
Miss Lena Farnham Stokes, a woman of delicate sensibilities, had changed the channel to a groundbreaking show about four gorgeous single women living in New York. Miss Delaney crossed and gently took the remote, reminding her, “Lena, this is the show you saw before, remember?”
Lena said, “Oh, that’s right. Those pictures they put at the start are always so enticing. I forget.” Since arriving at Pleasant Valley, the best of Lena’s grand décor had been squeezed into her assisted-living apartment and she had, for some reason, finally begun to entertain. Having heard or read that this program was racy and naughty, she had invited a half-dozen other female residents to watch it with her. Someone brought a cake and Miss Grace Hartwell made her festive punch. Everyone gathered around the TV with wicked anticipation. Then, halfway through the episode, there was some sort of social gathering at which a naked man was manually masturbated until he finally ejaculated all over the faces and party dresses of the four dynamic female stars. For years, nothing had happened within the confines of Lena Farnham Stokes’s grandiose movie set, but now something had and the women who were there would never forget it. Lena herself was so taken aback, her hand fell from her cheek, causing the sides of the face not to match. The other attendees were so stunned, some had to be helped back to their rooms. After word got around, when any program came on that was said to be “groundbreaking,” all the female residents of Pleasant Valley who were able scrambled for the remote in order to turn the thing off.
By now most of the elderly people had fallen asleep on the sofa or in their chairs. Almost no one noticed when Rudy entered carrying a boom box, setting it against the far wall and inserting one of Dr. Mac’s old tapes. Jeter gave Rudy a conspiratorial look, then pretended to read his magazine while keeping his eyes just above the page. Rudy began sweeping the floor nonchalantly with a large industrial broom. Miss Delaney shuffled the cards in preparation for another hand. It wasn’t long before a glorious sound began to drift over and around them, adding color to the lifeless beige walls and making the overhead fluorescent lights seem a little dazzling. Even the all-too-familiar urine smell had suddenly become sweeter. It was more than just music. The individual notes, the instrumentation, the unique phrasing were simultaneously vibrant, hopeful, naughty, and fun. And it washed over Pleasant Valley’s wintry boarders like sun being lapped up by old sea lions. Miss Delaney smiled at Jeter. Mr. Henry Dill, who never looked up, seemed to tap his foot. And Jeter was sure he heard Mrs. Evelyn Poole try to snap her fingers as Rudy’s hips began to sway with the beat. “A woman is a woman and a man ain’t nothin’ but a male.” Pretty soon a good number of arthritic hands were clapping to the strains of Louis Prima singing “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.” Serious was now on his feet keeping time with the beat. Lena Farnham Stokes was bobbing her head with all the sauciness of a chanteuse posed on a barstool. And when the music paused just so Louis could say, “Momma’s in the backyard learnin’ how to jive an’ wail,” Rudy tossed the broom handle to Serious, who threw it back in time for Rudy to catapult himself over the coffee table and into a whirling human gyration, ending in a perfect legs-to-the-floor split, his arms extended toward heaven. Several female residents who had not heard their own voices in years shrieked with delight. Mr. Henry Dill, who was now confused, held his ears and howled. Then Rudy leapt to his feet and accelerated the hip-swiveling motion as he traveled back across the room, matching each suggestive movement to the sound of newly awakened hands. In keeping with the idea that at the end of life there are no small victories, Miss Margaret Delaney blew Jeter a kiss from across the room. In return, he wiggled the only finger that worked.
CHAPTER 10
The little clock on Jeter’s nightstand glowed 11 P.M. A lonesome truck out on the interstate struggled to climb a hill. As the driver changed gears, Jeter willed him the strength to make it. Then it was quiet again. He hated nights like this, when he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t as though he could get up and go for a walk or run to the Quick Stop. On the contrary, he was stuck. And when morning came, he’d still be stuck, but at least there’d be light. And hope. He didn’t know why people couldn’t feel more hopeful in the dark, but it was harder.
He wished he could turn over on his stomach. Now he would have to wait till Rudy came back in the morning. In the meantime, he would do his best to forget about the fight with Mavis. What the hell was wrong with her anyway? She must really be getting desperate to come sniffing around a cripple for sperm.
He stared at the images in the plaster ceiling. In the corner was Abraham Lincoln in a stovepipe hat. It used to be an ape with a huge knot on his head, but he had changed it. Directly opposite was the profile of a wonderfully pert breast. He knew who that belonged to and he wasn’t going to mess with it. In between, there was a Coke bottle, some pointy mountains, the state of Texas, and a lot of other stuff that faded or returned according to his mood.
Since the accident he often lived inside his head. For the most part, life on the outside was hardly worth noticing. It was much nicer somewhere else, making love with the best-looking women in Paris, and yes, they were all babes. In his sparse existence, there was no room for imaginary homely girls with good personalities. Sometimes, when he got tired of the women, he could be found pulling small children out of burning houses or riding down Main Street on a float emblazoned with the words, “Carl Jeter, Pulitzer Prize–Winning Poet, Gold Medal Triathalon Man, and Paris County King of Cunnilingus.” Normally, he wasn’t rowdy or boastful, but that’s what could happen if the right combination of scotch and morphine got together. Anyway, he was thinking of phasing out the float because it always came with the sound of people cheering. And once people started cheering, that ball would not be far behind. It would, in fact, start coming toward him and then he would have to jump higher than he had ever jumped before, twisting himself in some strange new way.
It happened his senior year, when Paris was playing (for only the second time in half a century) for the Arkansas Class AAA State Championship. The score was 28–7. Wood, who was quarterback, could have run out the clock, but as people said later, he just wasn’t a run-out-the-clock kind of guy. In the final seconds, Wood threw an unbelievable fifty-three-yard pass. And Jeter, though nothing important was at stake, and though he knew the goalpost was coming up dangerously close, had made an almost Herculean effort to catch it.
Later, when he felt cold from the neck down, all he could think was how he never knew you could play the radio in an ambulance. It must have been an oldies station, because the words that he remembered went something like this: “Boogity-boogity, woogity-woogity-shoo.” How he hated that song. To this day, he didn’t know the name of it. Only that it had marked the end of him. Yes, he would go on and live inside the dead boy’s body. But it was over as sure as if a referee had fired his starter pistol, signaling the end of the game.
He and Wood had been magic together. Like their heroes Unitas and Berry, they had stayed for hours every night after practice, perfecting each move and play and possibility. During games, they regularly brought townspeople to their feet. If Wood faked left, Jeter was already twenty yards to the right and waiting. If Jeter were covered, he could break route and Wood would still know where to throw. They were a miraculously timed, two-man symphony of thought, anticipation, and action.
In a way, Wood had been his hero, too. When they were little and knocked a ball through a window, Wood was the one who always rang the doorbell and told. As they got older and Wood could have any girl he wanted, Jeter liked it that he never bragged about the ones he got. And then there was the way Wood left the football field, after throwing a spectacular touchdown pass, never dancing or thrusting his fist into the air, but
rather, moving fast, head down, without acknowledging the cheering crowd. Jeter liked that, too.
After his accident, he remembers Wood standing at the end of his bed. He had a look that Jeter had seen before. It was after a truck had run over Wood’s dog, Ted. Somehow, the bumper had torn Ted open and Wood had tried to stick his heart back in. That was the look Wood had in Jeter’s hospital room. It’s still there sometimes, when he wakes up and Wood is staring at him. The same look, after all these years, still there.
When Jeter came home, his parents’ living room became his room, so he could sit in his wheelchair and look out the picture window onto Main Street. Strangely, he had never cried over what happened. Even today, the only thing that could make him weep was the goodness of his own mother and father. People so hardworking and earnest, even in pictures when they were young, they still looked worn-out. If he closed his eyes, he could see them now, pulling away from the house, the backs of their heads framed by their old Buick. Hank, in his beat-up canvas hat and nylon jacket. And Pauline with her pocketbook in her lap. On their way to make a payment on a note or maybe to buy him some new pajamas or a birthday card. They could spend twenty minutes at the drugstore looking for just the right one. The one that had to have the word “Son” on it, like “For a Fine Son” or “Happy Birthday, Son.” And then it had to say something about Carl that was true. Something that if they could, they would have said themselves.
Sometimes, Jeter wished he could crawl into their old backseat again. That the three of them were still riding around like they used to. Maybe they’d just had dinner at the truck stop and were on their way home. It would probably have been chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and the salad bar with those little packages of crackers that he had to open for his mother on account of her arthritis. Afterward his parents would worry if they’d left enough for a tip. Then Hank would pay the bill and put his arm around his son as they talked their way out.
“How are you tonight, Mr. Malvern? Yes, sir, it sure is. Boy, they grow up fast, don’t they? They sure do.”
After Hank had spun the little toothpick dispenser, getting one for himself and buying a York peppermint patty for his wife, they were off again, driving through the streets of Paris. By now, Carl would probably be lying on his back in the rear window, eating a cone from the Dairy Queen and looking up at the stars. The old Buick would stop and start again at the end of every block, keeping a soft rhythm with his parents’ conversation.
“Looks like old Virgil’s really got the business tonight.”
“Wonder what they’re buildin’ there?”
“Miss Minnie Ritchie’s yard sure does have the roses, don’t it?” And so on. And so on. Until the mother and father’s quiet, melodic words lulled their boy to sleep, like the sound of the Champanelle River when they all went camping.
There had been another boy once, but he had died before Jeter was born. Dr. Mac called it some kind of meningitis. But others claimed he was the last baby in Arkansas to die of polio. Whatever it was, Hank said his and Pauline’s hearts “stayed near broke till ten years later when Carl come.”
As Jeter grew, he worked right alongside them in the little grocery store below their apartment, at first stocking shelves and later manning the cash register while standing on a box. Over the years, Hank Jeter gave away so much credit that the store was near going under. Luckily, Mervin Ritchie, when he wasn’t delivering groceries for Hank, had made a tidy sum of money buying repossessed land at auctions. Enough, in fact, to become a full partner in the store. The deal was made on a small white envelope, the kind with a window in it where a name could go. On the back were the words, “Hank Jeter and Mervin Ritchie now own Jeter’s Market, fifty-fifty.” That was it. No lawyers. Nothing to file. Just a good hard handshake that lasted for thirty years.
Hank and Pauline were gone now. And Mervin Ritchie slept away his days at the nursing home, a few rooms down the hall from their son. When Hank died, people came from all around to tell Jeter how his dad had helped them out during this one year or that, when their kids never had enough to eat. Milan’s mother told him flat out that when Tom Lanier was in the mental ward, their family would have starved to death if it had not been for Hank and Pauline Jeter. How she had tried to trade the only thing she had of value, an old silver-plated punch bowl, for a Christmas turkey. And how Hank would not hear of it. Later, when Mervin had delivered the box of free groceries, stuffed in the bottom were twelve pairs of new socks. Mrs. Lanier knew Jeter’s did not sell socks, which caused her to have to wipe her eyes with a pair of them. Jeter had attempted to remind Mervin of this story, but the older man just stared at him and finally yelled without his teeth, “Are you Hank’s boy? You better tell him I can’t open up tomorrow. Now don’t ask me no more.”
Strangely, Jeter felt most comfortable with the old people who lived with him. It wasn’t that he enjoyed their company so much as he appreciated their lack of judgment. Their struggle each morning was to stay one more day in this world or to sleep until they were called to the next one. Most of them had neither the interest nor the ability to notice that his wheelchair was sometimes dirty or that his body was shrinking. The fact was, they were all shrinking. He repaid their acceptance in little ways. Like reminding Miss Phipps when the first day of autumn was so that she could make the appropriate wardrobe adjustments. Or telling others when it was time to deposit their Social Security checks or take their medicine.
After his parents passed away, Jeter had made one vain attempt to start a new life. Despite everyone’s protest, he had paid a young couple whom he met at the truck stop to drive him to California. Sixteen hours later, a highway patrolman found him lying belly-up in the hot Amarillo sun, with his pockets hanging out of his pants. Wood and Brundidge had come to get him. As they had so often, Wood and Milan begged him to live with them, but he declined. A few days later, he moved into the nursing home and the Paris Jaycees bought him a new wheelchair. Since then he had spent most of his time writing poetry and tutoring high school students.
But his deepest passion was reserved for the Literary Society of Paris, of which he and Miss Delaney were the founders. The society had over forty members. Their simple stated goal was to honor, enjoy, and make available to others the superbly written word. By others, they especially meant people like Wanda Faye Marlin, a tenth-grade dropout who in spite of being warned that Hemingway was a man’s writer, fell so in love with Lieutenant Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms that she later broke up with her boyfriend for being uninteresting. The society still gets hate mail from him to this day. And there was Dub Wilkerson, who was one of the last people in town still willing to pump your gas for you. When Jeter had been getting his wheelchair tires filled at the Texaco, he swore he heard Dub say to another attendant, in his sweet twang, “Hey, Virgil, how’d you like that Pride and Prejudice? I toldja it was good, did’n I?”
Teachers and college graduates belonged to the society, too. But, over the years, it was the unsparing literary critiques of ordinary folks that delighted Jeter and filled his journals. Things like “Well, you know, he built that big house and threw all them parties to put on the dog for her, but she was just sorry. And the people around her was sorry, too, ’cept for the one that told the story.” Or “He let that fish just eat him up. You know, it’s never a good idea to let a fish get to thinkin’ it’s smarter than you are.” Or “When that Negro preacher got the little girl by the arm and said, ‘Stand up, Scout, your daddy’s passin’.’ Well, it just went right through me. In the whole history of talkin’, has there ever been any words said better than that?”
But the Literary Society meeting that changed Jeter’s life was the one that occurred on a clear December night, just after they had finished the annual reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” Miss Delaney stood up and announced that she had a most special treat. She said she had been going through some old boxes filled with the work of her most prized students and had come across a poem. She als
o said that she had asked for and received the author’s permission to read it. Jeter, who had been only seventeen when it was written, felt that it was much too amateurish for public consumption. Also, time and distance had since muted the raw moment in the poem, which could now only serve to embarrass him. But Miss Delaney was so sure of its value, he hadn’t had the heart to turn her down. And here she was standing, holding it in her hand.
Jeter stared at the floor as the room went quiet.
“Many of you are familiar with this author’s work,” Miss Delaney said. “But it is always interesting to see the beginning. It is a young man’s poem, written right after his injury in a high school football game.” No one looked at Jeter as Miss Delaney began.
I wonder how my nights would fare
Had I been spared
The time when young men
Singe at a woman’s touch,
Had I been disdainful of the warmth of womanhood
By a sort of coolant added to my blood.
But instead my blood boiled high
At the slightest stroke, and I, a devil Romeo
With a fresh haircut and a wild heart
Went off to play my part.
Till stalled in a field, out of the game
I cursed that my wick should flicker here, my fellow-lame
As young girls I have never known
Danced round my head without a care
Tonight the boy stalled in a field
Will sleep like an old man dozing in a chair
And dream of woman, burning in the air.
At first, no one made a sound. Then there was polite applause. Milan, who had come along only to impress Wood, got up and left. A moment later, she was holed up in a stall of the ladies room, her face buried in a handful of paper toilet-seat covers. It had been the same way in high school when Wood had broken up with her. There was never any toilet paper when she needed to cry.
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