“It was you,” Tom said. “You’re the one in the picture. You broke into our house and unplugged the plugs. You turned on the lights.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” the boy said, grinning that terrible grin from the night before. “Did you sleep at all last night? Look at you.”
“How many people have you run out of here just like that?” Tom said. He kneeled down to be at eye level with the boy, who looked down at the dog. “Come on, kid—you got me, just tell me the truth. It was you. You got a key somehow or you found some way to get in. The whole thing was you.”
“You’re wiggy, man,” the boy said. “I was just takin’ out the trash when I saw you and your old lady. Scarred me for life.”
“It was you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the boy said, looking up, his face blank. “Now, I think y’all were saying y’all are gone go. You want some help loading up your shit?”
“No, thank you,” Tom said. He couldn’t be sure. And even if he was sure, what did that mean? Maybe it meant he wasn’t that stupid a motherfucker, but what good did it do him?
“All right, then.” The boy stood up and unleashed the dog, who sat next to him, perfectly still. “What’s his name again?” the boy said, handing Tom the leash.
Tom told him. The word barely came out.
“What the hell kinda name is that?” the boy said. “Come on, pup pup, let’s take us a walk, figure out your fuckin’ name.”
And the boy and the dog walked off north on Graymont. The boy started whistling a tune, high and sweet and clear. The wind was in off the coast, and Tom could still hear him whistling as they rounded the corner and disappeared into the dewy morning sunlight behind the Episcopal church on Trent.
MAYFLIES
The mayflies are spawning this time of year, in waves off the Coosa River. There must be a million of them pressed flat against the glass walls. It’s pretty gruesome to look at, but all the places that stay lit up at night have them. They only live a few hours, then they fly from the river and fling themselves into the glass and die.
I’ve seen thirty-seven summers in this little town, thirty-seven years of mayflies. Women in my family live a long time. I’ll see many more.
Sandy tells me they only live to give other animals, fish and birds and bats, something to eat, says she learned that in biology. A flying crop, her teacher called them. Sandy’s marrying the ketchup bottles. She lays two or three towels out on one of the tables, then she sets the less full bottles on top of the more full bottles and seals them together with the ketchup gunk around the lips. She always makes a big production out of it, and it slows us down, but I’ve quit trying to tell her that. By the time she gets that done I’ve pretty much finished up all the side work, and Royce is no help either.
Royce hides out in the back instead of getting out the mop and cleaning all those mayflies off the walls. He’s either in the mirror looking at his arm muscles, or he’s sitting and smoking cigarettes and moping around and grousing about having to do even the simplest thing. No one makes him work here. No one put a gun to your head. That’s what Bing says. He’s the owner. Bing always says that. I hear it coming every time. A customer gripes about something—Hey, no one put a gun to your head. When the day girl complains about working a heavy lunch by herself—Hey, no one put a gun to your head. Bing wants to move to South Carolina and run a fishing rig, but he keeps coming back to the café. Hey, no one put a gun to my head.
I’ve got mustard stains on the cuticle of my right thumb. Ketchup, steak sauce, egg yolk all come out easy. But not mustard, no matter how I scrub. Royce is standing in the bathroom doorway with that chipped-tooth grin.
“I’m gonna go, Ms. Willet,” Royce says. “It’s about that time.”
“You get those flies?” I say. There’s a big male thumbprint on the women’s bathroom mirror. I wet a brown paper towel and go to wiping on it, because I don’t want to look at Royce, who thinks he’s menacing me.
“No, ma’am, but there’ll just be more tonight. I’ll get ’em first thing.”
When you’ll be late, and Bing will have done it himself by then. Oh well, you know what Bing would say.
“Something on your mind, Ms. Willet?” Royce says now, in a little voice like you’d talk to a small child. I can see him in the mirror now since he’s moved in behind me in the little bathroom. He smells like chicken grease and cheap cigarettes, and I know what’s coming next. I’m back bent over the sink, working on my thumb, when Royce reaches up and puts his hand on my breast. I don’t move it, or stand up. He presses himself up against me now, and I stand, and his other hand comes to my other breast. I let him go on a minute. It’s my fault, and no one else ever wants to touch them. But it’s not happening again. Not tonight.
“Go on, Royce,” I say after a minute. “Get on about your business.”
“I’m about my business now,” he growls, trying to act all manly and evil and seductive. But he doesn’t fool me. I know evil.
Four years ago my oldest boy, Ronnie, shot and killed my baby, Ford, with their father’s .38. It was ruled an accident. Ronnie’s nineteen now, somewhere in Iraq with the US Marine Corps. Ford will always be nine. That is evil.
I knock his hands away and move past him out the bathroom door. Sandy’s putting the caps on the last of the ketchup bottles. Royce doesn’t follow me. I hear him hoot as the back door slams. Then his car starts up, and you can hear that all over town—a 1975 Dodge Charger he rebuilt from the tires up, the only thing Royce has ever worked at in his life. He makes his usual pass through the gravel parking lot, raising dust and spinning out, gunning his engine. It makes the walls shake, but no mayflies fall off. Finally, he pulls out of his spin and hits the paved road, his back wheels catching and straightening as he speeds away.
“What. A. Redneck,” Sandy says. I want to tell her she’s wrong, that Royce is not a redneck. Rednecks are called rednecks because their necks are red from working in the sun all day, and Royce wouldn’t know work if it knocked him for a loop. He’s a twenty-four-year-old child already well past the apex of his powers, I want to say. He’s trash, and his people are trash, and his momma was definitely trash, because I went to high school with that one, but she’s dead now, and so I say nothing.
“You about ready?” I say. There are still things to do, but I really will do them tomorrow—I’m covering for the day girl for the third time this month, not that I’m counting.
“Well, yeah, I’m ready,” Sandy says, glad to be leaving early on a Friday night. I check the front door, then turn out all the lights as we leave through the back. There, more mayflies, in the primes of their lives, twitter and flash in the pool cast by the security light. We step quickly into the dark parking lot, but Sandy doesn’t move fast enough and gets one stuck in her hair.
“Gross! Gross!” she says, swatting at it and then putting her book bag over her head as she trots toward my car. Sandy’s mother drops her off in the afternoons and I give her a ride home most nights. She’s on my way.
“I’ve never seen so many,” she says, pulling the car door shut. “Aren’t there more this year?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Seems about like usual.”
“They live for three years underwater. That’s the larval stage.”
We drive out along Rainbow Drive, what passes in Pine City for a main drag, and Sandy stares out the windshield at the waves of clear silver sweeping across the road.
“Then they come up out of the water,” she says. “Do you know they can’t eat when they come up?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“They only come up to mate,” Sandy says, then pauses, then sighs. She’s a melodramatic girl who claims to have big dreams. Her senior year’s coming up at County. She’s set to be valedictorian. Says next it’s down to Auburn for vet school. So far she hasn’t let any of these boys drag her down too bad. I’ve worked with Sandy for two years, but I don’t really know her—I don�
��t want to. Not that she’s not agreeable enough, as these little Pine City princesses go. I’m just out of the getting-to-know-people business.
“And then, after they mate, they die,” Sandy says now. “The males die right away. But the females have to go around and lay the eggs. Those are all females on the windows, all females flying around.”
She looks in the mirror on the back of the visor and gently pulls strands of her brown bangs down over her forehead. I’ll drop her at her house, she’ll go in and change, and then she’ll be on the phone for a ride to Hardee’s. The high-school kids, and the ones who didn’t leave after high school, they all hang out in the parking lot there. It’s what Pine City has instead of a singles bar.
When I was Sandy’s age it was Runt’s, downtown. Runt-burgers for a buck, cheese and tomato twenty cents extra. Buck Willet with shiny black hair, chain-smoking Camel straights with his boot on the fender of his father’s Le Sabre. Pabst Blue Ribbon from across the county line in wax soda cups. My sweaty back against green vinyl and the smell of his father’s pipe mixing with Buck’s Aqua Velva as he moved above me in the dimness from the streetlight at the corner of Cherry Street and Park. Then we’d go back to Runt’s for more beer, and Buck would prop me there on the hood of his old man’s car, like a fancy hood ornament or a trophy fish. I doubt that Buck Willet has ever in his life been more at home than he was in the parking lot of Runt’s at eighteen years old. I got pregnant and married him. What does that say about me?
I’m not paying attention and almost miss the turn to Sandy’s house. When she says, “Here it is,” it makes me jump a bit in my seat and put the brakes on a little too hard. I’ve been zoning out like this more and more lately. Royce drives ninety miles an hour down residential streets. I never exceed the speed limit, but I’ll be the one who ends up running over someone’s kid.
“Night, Ms. Willet,” Sandy says, then, “Thanks,” like she always does. I’d like to be able to tell her things. I’d like to tell her to go away, farther than Auburn. Go states away, countries away. Go and don’t come back.
I watch until she’s in the house, and then I light my first cigarette since coming on to work that afternoon. The menthol hits the back of my throat like ice and I feel the nicotine trickling through me. I pull back out into the street, watchful, careful, and slowly drive toward my house on Argyle Road.
When I get to the house, I slow down to turn in the drive. From the street I can see the glow of the television washing through the windows in the dark front room. Buck’s asleep on the couch, surrounded by beer cans and dirty dishes. His mouth is open, and his gut hangs out the bottom of his T-shirt. He smells like rotten cheese and drunk sweat. Some nights I’ll clean up and drag him to the bedroom. Some nights I don’t, and he wakes up in the morning so stiff and sore he can hardly get out of the chair except to get another beer. Not that it matters, anyway. Buck tried to hang on for a while there after Ford died, but now he never leaves the house. A couple years ago, he took all our savings and hired a Birmingham lawyer to get him declared non compos mentis over his depression and his panic attacks, and now he gets a disability check every month. He’s trying to drink himself to death, and I don’t guess I’ll try to stop him.
Some nights, like this one, while I watch him sleep in the reflection of some shark show on the TV, I think, why wait? Why not go into the knives and stab him right in the heart while he sleeps? Or poison him, probably better. We aren’t New York City or anything, but we’ve got some chaos around here. A couple years ago, a guy I went to high school with, Walker Mills, he went crazy and blew his whole family up in their rented house out on the rural route. He’d been cooking meth for years, and they said it was a lab accident, but I don’t believe it. Walker knew what he was doing.
People around the café talked about it, the Mills case, all their useless opinions. It made me sick, made me wonder how they talked about Ronnie and Ford and Buck and me when I wasn’t around. Sometimes I come in to work, and everyone at the counter gets real quiet. Like last year when that kid went crazy and shot up the college in Virginia, Bing’s was probably the only diner counter in America where the old coots weren’t lined up with their useless opinions about the deterioration of the culture. I wish they’d just keep on talking. The silence, like the silence in my house, is worse than all the wrongness there could be.
I sit and stare at Buck for a long time. My bed is only twelve steps from where I sit, but even though I’ve got to get up and work in the morning, I can’t take it tonight. I grab my keys, slam the back door, start my car. I light another cigarette, and pretty soon I’m pulling into Cherry Street Park, where the kids still fuck in their parents’ backseats. Three or four dark cars are parked out behind the ball field now. If I was to sit here and watch long enough, I’d eventually see shapes moving around inside the cars like shadowy fish in the bottom of a dark pond, see the tip of a cigarette or the glow of dashboard lights through the fogged-up windows.
One day, about a year after Ford died, I came to this park and sat on a swing where I brought him to play as a child. It was a sunny, cool morning in November, and I sat on that swing and cried for a solid hour. It wasn’t the only time I’d cried since it happened. When I got the call at the café from Acie Boujean, I was hysterical. And I cried at the funeral, and I cried when Ronnie told me he was sorry. I cried when Acie came and told me he’d have to question Ronnie again. About a week after it happened, I really lost it at the café. I’d shown up to work, but Bing gave me a couple hundred dollars and told me to take some time off.
But that day in the park, when I cried for an hour in the warm sun and cool air, I knew it was different, and I still know it was different. I knew that day, and know even better now, that I wasn’t crying for Ford and what happened to him. I was crying for me, and what had happened to me, and I’ve never quite been able to let myself off the hook for that.
At the end of Cherry Street, I turn back onto Rainbow Drive. I don’t know where I’m going, just driving around. I turn at Sandy’s street and drive slowly by her house. All the lights are out, the whole street’s dark. It’s late, and no matter how badly I don’t want to do it, I have to go home and get some sleep. I pull down to the end of Sandy’s street, a bank of grass and wildflowers that cover the barbed wire around Hank Fletcher’s farm, and slowly turn my car around. I’ll sit here and smoke one more cigarette. I turn the car off, the headlights too, and roll down the window, letting in the June heat. I can hear the mayflies humming in the quiet night, all the way from the river.
I smoke another cigarette, then another, sitting here in the dark, listening to the mayflies. There are other, closer sounds. The crickets in the weeds behind my car. The ticking of the engine cooling down. The sound of the cigarette when I inhale is like a tiny fuse. But it’s the mayflies I hear more than anything else. I go to light another cigarette but the pack is empty, so I open the glove box for a new one. I feel my bra cutting creases under my shoulder blades—I’ve put on a couple of pounds. I reach around under my shirt to unhook it, leave the loops on over my shoulders. My breasts sag heavy down onto what is not quite yet a gut. I can still feel Royce’s hands on them. I shouldn’t encourage him that much.
I light another cigarette and blow the cool menthol smoke over my face. My other hand is back on the steering wheel now, the noise of the mayflies growing louder like the engine of a fast car, a better car than my ten-year-old Chevy. We bought this car new when Ford was five. He and Ronnie used to ride in the back when we’d go places. Ronnie was big enough to sit in the front, but Ford was still in his car seat, and Ronnie didn’t want him to feel lonely. I could only see the tops of their heads in the rearview mirror as I drove, Ronnie’s crew-cut black hair as black as Buck’s, Ford’s still baby-blond but starting to darken. Maybe Ford would have been his high school’s valedictorian, maybe he could have gone to vet school. Ronnie was always a Marine—he knew he wanted to be one when he was six years old. A few good men and all that shit. Tonig
ht, all I see is the bank of weeds and a dark, empty field like a lake beyond.
But I can still hear the engine noise, the noise of the faster car, and it takes me a moment to realize that’s what it is.
Royce’s black Dodge Charger, headlights off, turns the corner and parks in front of Sandy’s house. He puts the car in neutral, and in the darkness of the street I can barely see, barely hear the passenger door open, barely see Sandy’s dark figure get out, stand there for a moment, then lean back in for a kiss.
Then she shuts the door carefully and half-runs into the darkened carport, where the light was on when I dropped her off earlier. Royce puts his car in reverse and slowly backs up toward the corner, lights still out, then turns, puts on his headlights, opens and slams the passenger door, and peels out up Rainbow Drive.
I start my car and follow with the headlights off. There’s no one else on the road except Royce a few hundred yards ahead. The mayflies, which had been clear silver in my headlights, now look like a huge gray ghost in the darkness ahead of me. I roll up the window so they don’t fly right in my car. I can hardly see but I know this road. The mayflies pock against the windshield. For some reason—drunkenness, fatigue, sexual satisfaction—Royce isn’t speeding. I’m gunning it now, and I’ve nearly got him.
At the crest of the hill where Rainbow opens up to Highway 59, I’m right on his back. I pull the switch for the high beams and the road explodes into moving light. Royce’s brake lights swerve some, his chrome bumper a blur, mayflies everywhere. Royce slows down, turns into the old Shell station parking lot.
He stops his car there. I stop mine on the road. He’s getting out of his car with that tough, mean look he thinks he has, his arms all bowed out from his sides. I put my car in reverse, back up turning, and aim my headlights right at the driver’s side door, right at Royce.
Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 9