One Mississippi

by Mark Childress

  “Come on, Mommy,” Debbie pleaded, “take the picture.”

  “Deborah Ann,” Mr. Frillinger said. “Cooperate.”

  “Daddy — please? We don’t want to be late.”

  “Oh honey, I just can’t let you go!” Mrs. Frillinger wailed, dragging Debbie in for yet another hug. “Don’t leave me like this — whatever you do just don’t please don’t leave me alone in this house! Please not! Please not!”

  “Deirdre, for God’s sake let’s don’t have a scene now. The neighbors are watching.” Mr. Frillinger tugged her arm, pulling her back toward the house. “Boys, drive safe and get ’em home before twelve.”

  Debbie and Dianne ignored the spectacle of their father dragging their mother up the sidewalk. Their faces went carefully neutral, like the female crew of the space station in 2001.

  “Wow, is she gonna be okay?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dianne said. “She’s just a little nervous around people. Can we go?”

  For a moment I felt a twinge of pity, God how embarrassing, and then I remembered the monster in my own house. I guess lots of families have monsters. To me it was normal to have a crippled half-man rolling around our house on a padded scooter. If these girls saw Jacko, they’d be giving me the same look of pity I was giving them now.

  Tim and Debbie took the front seat. I got in back with Dianne.

  Now, the backseat of a Riviera is a very roomy place. I don’t know if it felt too roomy for me back there, if I thought we might flop around loosely and bump into each other or something — I don’t know what, exactly, led me to buckle my seat belt, but I did, and I told Dianne to buckle hers too. “Tim drives like a maniac,” I said. “We don’t want any casualties.”

  “That’s so thoughtful of you, Daniel.” Dianne giggled and smoothed her dress. “Drive careful, Tim. I don’t feel like buckling in. I’m living dangerously tonight.”

  Debbie turned in her seat. “Did you guys hear? I mean, did you hear?”

  “What.”

  “You’re going to die,” she said. “Guess who thinks she’s gonna be Queen of the Prom.”

  “Molly Manning,” said Tim.

  “Not Molly, of course Molly’s got a chance. An excellent chance.”

  “Lisa Simmons?” I said.

  “Oh be serious, Daniel! Lisa ought to be queen. Cute as she is, and hard as she’s worked this year? She organized that whole bake sale by herself. Nobody lifted a finger to help.”

  Debbie said, “I’ll give you a hint. Who is the last girl in the eleventh grade you think would ever get elected Queen of the Prom?”

  Tim pulled into a 7-Eleven just inside the Jackson city limits.

  “Rachel Bostick,” I said. Poor Rachel weighed about two seventy-five and had fur on her arms.

  The girls made sympathetic little cries at the sound of her name. “Be serious,” Debbie said. “This girl is going around telling everybody that when they see her prom dress, they’ll have to vote for her. They won’t be able to vote for anybody else.”

  “Can you imagine?” said Dianne. “So conceited.”

  Debbie got up on her knees on the seat. “Give up? Brace yourselves. Arnita Beecham.”

  “Arnita?” Tim said. “Yeah, I can see that.” He got out of the car.

  Debbie looked peeved by this mild response. She whirled on me. “Daniel?”

  “Well, Arnita is really pretty, you have to admit.”

  “Oh come on, Daniel.”

  “What?”

  “Well, she’s black.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” Nobody had ever seen a black girl like Arnita. Her father, Lincoln Beecham, had been the janitor at Minor High forever. Arnita was pretty but studious-looking, with wire-rimmed glasses and old-fashioned ironed hair. She played first-chair flute in the band. She belonged to all the clubs and organizations and was every teacher’s pet. She was not meek like the other black girls, who tended to clump together, speaking in private black-girl code. Arnita sat in front, raised her hand, argued fiercely with the teachers. Last fall she caused a commotion in Canzoneri’s government class with a speech entitled “Why Castro Is Right.” She had a 4.0 average and a full scholarship to Ole Miss a year before graduation. I’d never thought of her as the beauty-queen type, but I was sure she could do it if she made up her mind.

  “There’s only like twenty percent black in our school,” Debbie said. “You don’t really think she has a chance to be Queen?”

  “Why not? She’s a great girl.” I knew why not, but I wanted to make Debbie say it.

  “Of course she’s great,” Debbie said, her voice rising. “Nobody’s saying she isn’t great, it’s just — oh, never mind.”

  Dianne spoke up: “Come on, Daniel, it’s pretty unrealistic to think Arnita could win.”

  “Why?”

  “Well silly, to win she’d have to get not just all the black votes but a whole lot of white ones too.”

  “I’d vote for her,” I said.

  “Daniel’s a Yankee, he doesn’t understand,” Debbie said. “Listen, we’re perfectly fine with them going to our school, but they can’t just walk in and expect to win everything their first year. They have to earn it like everybody else.”

  How had I wandered into this danger zone? Every so often I got a sharp jab of the elbow to remind me that I was not from around here.

  “Well,” I said, “you can always pray for her to lose.”

  Here came Tim not a moment too soon, carrying a brown paper sack.

  “Timmy, what did you buy?” Dianne called.

  Tim reached one hand in the bag and whisked out a six-pack of Champale.

  The girls gasped. “Oh my gosh!” Debbie shrieked. “That’s — is that alcohol?”

  “They didn’t have champagne,” Tim said. “The guy said this was the closest thing they had.”

  Dianne was scandalized. “How on earth did you buy it?”

  “Fake ID. Y’all ready to party?”

  “Oh no, Daddy would kill us,” said Dianne.

  “Daddy’s not here, Dianne,” her sister said. “Couldn’t we have one tiny taste?”

  This was a new frontier for all of us. Our parents were teetotalers, and so were all the kids we ran with. Those Champale bottles glistened like two rows of bullets in the light from the 7-Eleven. Tim popped off the caps and passed us each a bottle. “A toast,” Tim said. “To our big night.” We clinked.

  I braced myself and took a slug. I choked it down, grinned, and said it was tasty. That’s the word I used, “tasty.” In fact it was foul. Everybody took a sip and pretended to like it, but we were all thinking, Why would anyone drink this?

  “Now don’t get too drunk, Tim,” said Debbie.

  Tim said, “I wonder if this is even close to champagne.”

  “I tasted a beer once,” Dianne said.

  “You did not!” her sister exclaimed.

  “Yes I did, at Uncle Sibley’s funeral. That man from the power company had a beer and I had some when nobody was looking. It tasted different than this.”

  “Oh my God, the demon rum has loosened her tongue!” Tim said. “It’s true confession time! Drink up, ladies!” The girls giggled and took timid sips. We felt naughty and grown-up — dressed up, drinking and driving a big car fast, as the night sky fell over Jackson.

  The downtown huddle of buildings looked rather handsome from the interstate. One or two more tall buildings and it would be a skyline. The tallest old building had the words STANDARD LIFE lit up in red letters on top. (“Truer words were never spoken,” Tim liked to say.) There were four or five tallish office buildings and two capitol domes, Old and New. On the plain below the city was the brand-new Mississippi Coliseum, a yellow-sided futuristic building shaped like a merry-go-round, with a white pleated roof. The interstate swept a wide loop around it and shot us off to the north.

  We took the exit for Fortification Avenue, which I pronounced “Fornication” to general merriment. The Champale got better as you drank it, and brought
on a giddy sensation I found myself enjoying. Soon we were pulling off the frontage road into the parking lot of Howard Johnson’s.

  I trotted around to open Dianne’s door. She said, “Thynk you, suh,” attempting an English accent. Tim shot me a look that I managed to ignore.

  It was only when we were inside, waiting by the sign that said PLEASE WAIT HERE, that I realized what a sight we presented in our Sky Blue tuxes and their long fancy dresses. The HoJo was full of truckers, salesmen, families with squabbling children. The most dressed-up people were the waitresses in turquoise and orange. One of them approached us with sympathetic eyes.

  “Good evening,” she said. “Don’t you ladies look lovely tonight, and the gentlemen too. Will we have the pleasure of serving you dinner this evening?”

  We nodded.

  “Right this way, if you please,” she said. I will always be grateful to Myrna (her name tag) for the effortless grace with which she swept us across that room and seated us in the corner booth. Everyone cast admiring glances as we passed. We sat in splendor at the best table in the house and ordered cheeseburgers, french fries, chocolate shakes.

  Myrna treated us like celebrities, even brought us two slices of strawberry pie on the house. I thought Dianne might burst into tears. “Oh boys, this was the perfect place to bring us,” she said. “I’ll never forget this night as long as I live.”

  “Dianne is tipsy,” said Tim.

  “I am not!” she cried, welling up again.

  Once more I buckled up in the backseat. Once more Dianne said she was living dangerously. We rolled off toward the Holiday Inn with the radio cranked so we could all sing along with Elton, “Rocket Man.”

  Maybe it started with the singing.

  More likely it was the girls’ perfumes mixed with the Glade Summer Meadow in the confines of the car that caused me to sneeze. And again. And again. Everyone laughed. I rooted around in the floorboard for a Kleenex box, grabbed a tissue. I blew my nose and sneezed again. Every time I sneezed, Tim made a funny noise, “Ow!” or “Oof!” Each one of these sent the girls off in a fresh gale of hilarity. I couldn’t stop sneezing. I rolled down my window and asked them to roll theirs down, but oh no God forbid they should mess up their hairdos. I sneezed all the way down Fornication Avenue while everyone had a good laugh about it.

  I didn’t find it amusing. I was already nervous about the Sky Blue tux and the whole prom thing and Mr. Frillinger’s lecture and Mrs. Frillinger’s frenzy of desperate need, and how the people at the HoJo stared at us, and now I could not stop sneezing. I mashed my nose with the wad of Kleenex.

  My nose started buzzing. A sneeze exploded, and another —

  “Daniel!” Tim yelled. “Get a grip on yourself!”

  “If you could just roll down your — Gachoo!” I saw stars.

  Dianne looked alarmed. “Are you okay?” She pressed the button, dropping her window. “You’re not getting the flu, are you?”

  “It’s got to be psychosomatic,” said Tim. “He’s allergic to the prom.”

  “Oh go to hell,” I said. “I can’t help it if I — Gaachoo!” A fierce twinge in my nose — my ears popped — my nose started to run. I mopped it with Kleenex.

  “Daniel — you’re — oh no!” Dianne squealed. “Y’all, he’s bleeding!”

  And so I was: that was blood running over my lip, into my mouth. I stared in cross-eyed horror at the sticky stuff coursing over the back of my hand. I tilted my head back, groping for Kleenex. The warm tang ran down my throat.

  Debbie said, “My gosh, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah — it’s just — subtimes I get dosebleeds,” I said into the tissue.

  Dianne shrank back; I might bleed on her dress. “Oh you guys, he’s bleeding a lot!”

  “Put a tourniquet on his neck, why don’t you,” Tim said.

  That last sneeze had popped something loose, some vital point in my head. My second-to-last Kleenex was sopping with blood. Debbie got up on her knees to get a better look.

  “Just relax,” I said. “It’ll stop in a biddit.”

  “At least you quit sneezing,” Tim said. “I prefer the bleeding. It’s much quieter.”

  We rolled past the vast pile of University Medical Center. Dianne said, “Y’all, he’s bleeding a lot. Maybe we should go to the emergency room.”

  “Doe!” I cried. “Let’s just go to the prob! I’ll be fide! Just — would you talk about subthing else please? Iddything!” The river ran out the hole in my head, pumping out a steady warm stream. What if the bleeding never stopped and this was my life draining out of me? I didn’t want to die in the backseat of Tim’s father’s Buick.

  “Don’t get blood on the seat,” Tim said.

  Dianne scolded, “Tim! Please!”

  Any minute now I would stop bleeding and this would become a great big hardee-har-har. We swung into the Holiday Inn parking lot, cruised slowly through a herd of promgoers. Tim found a spot under a tree. I kept my head back, resting on the shelf under the window. I saw girls in shiny prom dresses passing by, upside down.

  My fingers scrabbled in the bottom of the box. “Tib, you got any more Kleedex?”

  “Wait.” I heard Dianne rummaging in her purse. She pressed something soft and white into my hand, some kind of cottony pillow. I laid it against my face and smelled faint perfume, like toilet paper.

  I realized what it was. I thought I might die.

  I bled into it anyway. After a while the river slowed to a trickle, and stopped.

  Gingerly I sat up. “I think I’m okay.” The dam seemed to be forming, and holding. “Yep, I think it’s good. Let’s go in.”

  “You sure?” said Tim. “We don’t want to walk in there and your head explodes.”

  That’s when I went to unfasten my seat belt and found that it would not open. The button was stuck. I pressed harder.

  It would not open.

  Everybody else got out of the car. I pressed with all my strength against the center button of the buckle. I engraved the Buick emblem in the flesh of my thumb. That little steel bastard was frozen in place as if it had been welded shut.

  Tim leaned through the window. “You bleeding again?”

  “No.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “Tim.”

  “What.”

  “The seat belt, Tim. It’s stuck.”

  “What?” His face lit up, pure joy — what a perfect fool I was! This was total humiliation, the kind you can hang on to and lord over a friend for the rest of your lives. Tim laughed, oh my how he did laugh. He had to step back from the car, he was laughing so hard. I would have laughed too, if it had been anyone other than me.

  Debbie and Dianne crowded around. From their fussing and clucking you would think I had planned the whole thing, the nosebleed, the seat belt. I invited any of them to take a crack at the buckle. They all took a turn. No one could make it budge.

  Tim had stopped laughing. “Why the hell did you buckle it in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. I’m an idiot. What can I say?”

  “Say it again,” Tim said. “Say ‘I’m an idiot.’”

  “Tim, be nice,” Dianne said. “He didn’t mean to.”

  Tim found a screwdriver in the trunk. We pried and scraped, trying to wedge it open. Suddenly Tim got all squirrelly about damaging the seat belt of his father’s fine car.

  “Get back in the car,” he said. The girls obeyed. We drove through the stream of promgoers, two blocks up Mortification Avenue into the unholy glare of a Texaco station. The bellcord went ding! A greasy man in a gray shirt came out. The name-patch said Doug.

  “We don’t need gas,” Tim said. “My friend has managed to get himself stuck in the seat belt back there. Do you think you can help get him out?”

  Doug turned to see me in my frilly Sky Blue tux with the seat belt forever locked around my waist. His face lit up. His shout carried to the far garage bay. “Hey Raymond! Come get a loada this!”

  Raymond came, carrying his big be
lly before him. He joined in with guffaws and clever remarks. He called the other fellows from the garage to have a look.

  I groaned, and leaned back in the seat. Somehow that insignificant movement tore a hole in the dam in my nose. The spectators gasped as a rivulet of blood spilled across my lip. I flung back my head and groped for the sanitary napkin.

  The Frillingers sat quietly, their eyes averted as from a terrible accident. I cursed myself. WHY in the HELL did you have to fasten the damn SEAT BELT you damn stupid MORON. Every molecule of my stupidity danced before me in midair. Why had I buckled up? Not for safety. What was I afraid of? That Dianne might try to snuggle up to me? Was that it?

  Never has there been a bigger fool.

  The sight of blood ran off all the spectators except Raymond and Doug, who squatted to examine the buckle. “Yessir,” Raymond announced, “that thing is flat stuck. What you thank, Doug?”

  Doug nodded. “Have to cut it.”

  “What do you mean?” Tim said.

  “Cut the belt.”

  “No way! That’ll ruin it!” Tim came around the car. “Can’t you pry it open? Don’t you have some kind of special tool for when this happens?”

  “No,” said Raymond. “It’s stuck.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” I said. “It’s not my fault, Tim. It’s stuck.”

  “Well I can’t let ’em cut the seat belt! My father will freak out! This car is brand-new! It’s his baby!”

  “Well excuse bee,” I said. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Doug said, “I’ll get some shears.”

  “NO!” Tim pounded the roof of the car. “You cannot cut the seat belt!”

  I lifted the napkin. “Tim, for God’s sake. What am I supposed to do, sit here all night?”

  “Fine with me,” he said.

  “I can stay with you,” Dianne said.

  “No,” I said. “No, we’re gonna cut the durn seat belt and we’re all gonna go to the prom, and I’ll buy your father a new seat belt, okay? So you can just shut up about it. Okay?” I felt light-headed. Watch me faint, like a girl in a novel — just keel over from loss of blood.

  “I’ll never get to drive this car again,” Tim moaned.