Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Tonight a fund-raising pledge drive on the public television station had delayed the late movie, so Annie turned on the classic-rock radio station she listened to in the mornings. The Rolling Stones were coming to Atlanta later in the month, and the station was sponsoring a contest for free tickets. The D.J.s urged listeners to construct and decorate a box, no larger than seven by four by three, to live in for twenty-four hours, in isolation. The best three boxes would be set up in a corner of the studio. Annie had been hearing Stones music all week, and its raunchy urgency made her feel important things were happening in this city. She liked Atlanta—its clean, busy beauty. She opened the sliding doors to the sundeck and finished her Coke out there. The deck—with a tub of gardenias, a cherry-tomato plant, and a clematis climbing a trellis—opened out into a cozy, fenced yard. It was a mild autumn night, and the lights over at the shopping center silhouetted the feathery palm trees outside the nearby T.G.I. Friday’s. The sound of the radio spilled out like light into the dim parking lot.

  Annie was a sort of undercover agent. She had been hostessing at a Chez Suzanne’s in Texas and had met one of the executives, Andrew Parrell, from the New Orleans corporate headquarters. She had drinks with him a couple of times, and he hired her to seek out irregularities at the chain’s Atlanta restaurant. He even found her this place to stay—Clayton Scoville was an old friend of his. So that the Atlanta management wouldn’t suspect, she had to interview for the job, which she got on the spot. Andrew wanted her just to observe, to find out if anything funny was going on. He suspected stealing. She wrote detailed daily reports on staff morale and telephoned Andrew every two or three days.

  Annie Rhodes, Girl P.I. It sounded like one of the juvenile mysteries she used to read. It had a nice ring to it. And she’d earn more money than before—even more if she got to switch to cocktailing. Andrew wanted her to stay a month or two, and then he would send her to another restaurant. She hadn’t minded leaving Texas, a place she didn’t really know anyway. It was just the place she landed after college. Most of her college friends had spread out, and a few of them were in the Southeast, so she jumped at the chance to come here.

  “Just be yourself,” Andrew said reassuringly. “And don’t get personally involved.”

  She was herself, for the most part. The lie was the guy she’d moved here to be near. Andrew said she had to have a cover. So she invented Scott. He was six feet tall, a runner, and he had dark hair with a little kink to it. His work had something to do with computers. He traveled the South, coming to Atlanta frequently on jobs that were vague in her mind, but she hit on some realistic touches about him. His mother was a Catholic and his father a Protestant; they ran a grocery in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Scott had a retarded sister in an institution. He broke his leg once playing football. Annie had met him at school, where he had a computer-science scholarship that paid for everything but his books. His grandmother paid for his books, Annie figured.

  Annie, the Spy. So far, she hadn’t noticed anything unusual. The caramel drops on the meringue dessert; the food inspectors hanging around a long time one evening, buddy-buddies with the manager; the waitress who had once worked for the Carter family when Jimmy Carter was in the statehouse—“A cold fish if you ever saw one,” she said, and shivered.

  Annie’s hostess smile was efficient and convincing. She had heard that keeping up such an act made that sort of job among the world’s most stressful, but she didn’t mind. It was like being on automatic pilot. Occasionally, a man tried to slip her a five for a good table. But that was against policy. Tonight she noticed that the ficus tree in the foyer was remarkably dusty and sticky. Its leaves gave off a gummy substance that had dripped to the floor. In the mellow, atmospheric lighting the splotches were hardly noticeable, but her senses seemed sharpened now. She felt incredibly observant. She noticed the small ways the design of the abstract beige-and-blue decor varied from that at the sister restaurant. She noticed the supply of maraschino cherries arriving in a stained box that had been taped together; the colored lights that danced in the outdoor fountain at a slightly different speed from the similar fountain lights at the Texas place; the bartender’s cold, sad eyes. He had told her he had a daughter in college, a daughter who had frilly hair like hers. He used the word “frilly.” He meant permed.

  During the pre-dinner lull, she mentioned the sticky ficus to the head waiter, Wes Simmons, a pleasant fellow who seemed to be on good terms with everyone. Wes had a silly manner of joking with the staff, but at the same time Annie detected a genuineness beneath his conventional Southern charm. He was good-looking, in a weird way.

  “Why don’t they get an artificial tree?” he said, testing his shoe on a sticky spot. “This is ridiculous.”

  Theresa, a waitress with a modest, outdated punk hairstyle, said, “That tree’s got a case of scale.” She felt the leaves. “You can’t hardly see them. They’re little bitty brown bugs that make all that sticky stuff.”

  “What can I do with it?” said Wes, squinting at the underside of a leaf. “Spray it right here, with all this food?”

  “Set it out in the sun for two weeks,” advised Theresa. “And repotting helps.”

  “You can put it on my sundeck,” said Annie.

  “I’ll have to do something,” Wes said. He yawned, then apologized. “I was in line since midnight last night to get Stones tickets and then found out they wouldn’t take Visa! But this nice lady in line with me offered to let me borrow the cash. Nowadays something like that is so hard to believe, and then I think: Hurray, this is still the Old South.” He lifted his shoe again and examined the sole.

  “Oh, do you have any extra tickets?” Annie asked. She hadn’t even imagined being able to get tickets.

  “All I got are spoken for. I wish I could help you out.”

  “I love the Stones. My sister saw them once in Lexington, but I was too young to go.”

  “I always say if I could just see the Rolling Stones, I could die happy,” Wes said dreamily. He moved into the dining area and straightened a stack of napkins. Casually he twirled a peach-hued napkin into a fan and thrust it into a wineglass. Annie had learned that he had an extensive collection of Nova shows on tape and that he used to work for an escort service, but she didn’t know what to make of those facts. She wondered if she should have mentioned her sister in Lexington. Maybe she should have made up a brother in Chillicothe, Ohio. She shouldn’t have offered her sundeck for the sick plant.

  In the kitchen later in the evening, Wes grabbed a croissant and stuffed it with a hunk of chicken.

  “My tastes don’t run to paté and coq au vin,” he said as he squirted ketchup onto his sandwich. “Want to go with me to Uncle Frog’s Rib Shack sometime and get some real food?”

  “What would my boyfriend say?”

  “He’d say I feed you good,” he said, teasing. “Sorry I can’t take you to see the Stones. I could take you to Stone Mountain. But I guess that would be a dumb substitute.”

  “Did you mean what you said—that you could die happy if you saw the Rolling Stones?”

  “Sometimes I think like that,” he said, embarrassed. “I just can’t think of anything that would top the Stones, ecstasy-wise.”

  The way he said “ecstasy-wise” made Annie laugh. He was mocking the restaurant manager’s pompous jargon. She liked Wes, but she caught herself, as if there were a child inside her about to slam through a car windshield. What if she fell in love with him? She suddenly felt as though she were in a movie but simultaneously watching it, waiting to see what would happen. That evening at a corner table a pair of lovers were celebrating their engagement. They ordered everything rich, starting with brandy Alexanders and oysters on the half shell and finishing with fluted chocolate cups plopped full of peanut-butter mousse. He gave her the ring during the dessert, just after the champagne was poured. Annie got the impression that the proposal had been a total surprise to the woman. Annie heard her whine, “But I have to study for my CPA exam.”
/>   “When are you going to settle down?” Annie’s father wanted to know when she called her parents a little later that evening. She used the pay phone in the corridor by the restrooms and called collect, something her parents still insisted she do.

  “I’m not through rambling yet,” she said. “I haven’t even been to California. Or Alaska. I want to go to Alaska and roam around the tundra someday.”

  “It’s cold in Alaska,” he said. “Do you plan to live in an igloo?”

  “Funny, Dad. Very funny.”

  She didn’t tell her parents she was working undercover. They watched too much television.

  Her father said, “I worry about you, honey. Atlanta’s a big city.”

  “Yes, but it’s really very interesting. Everything’s called Peachtree here. Peachtree Street. Peachtree Plaza. It’s a real peachy place.”

  “I know I can’t talk you into getting a handgun, but at least you need a dog.”

  The thought of a dog struck her deeply, like what journalists call hard news. She hadn’t had a dog in three years. She didn’t mind being alone, and she kept thinking fondly of her suddenly widowed aunt Helen, who had jaunted off to Europe alone when getting a refund on the trip she’d planned with her husband proved to be problematic. Aunt Helen had the adventure of her life. It occurred to Annie that she’d rather have a dog than the ghostly Scott, who was beginning to seem like a creep. The notion of Scott had come to her during the flight to Atlanta, when she read an article about Japan in an airline magazine. In Japan, there were agencies that rented people out as wedding guests. It was cheaper to rent a person to play an old grandmother than to ship the real one in from the mountains. And people wanted important guests at their weddings, so they rented actors to impersonate public officials. All week Annie had been thinking about how some people wanted to believe that appearance and reality were the same. Later that evening, she realized that when she said good night to the bartender and told him she was going to see Scott that weekend she had momentarily believed it was true. She drove home from work, imagining Scott as one of those rag-doll dummies frightened women set in their passenger seats to ward off strangers.

  “Andrew, I don’t have much to report. Agnes went home early with an upset stomach. Frank, the salad man, said his car was being repossessed. One of the busboys flirted with me.”

  “You’re doing fine,” said Andrew. “It’ll take a while.”

  “One of the customers insisted he smelled pot in the restroom.”

  “Write that down. And just keep your eyes open. I always thought the problem there could turn out to be drugs.”

  “Are you kidding? You didn’t mention that.” Annie was exasperated with Andrew at times. He assumed too much, and he had such a limited life. All he did besides work was watch Star Trek reruns and ESPN. She knew little more about him except that he was stingy and insisted on a first-name basis with Annie, which made her feel peculiar and wary. She was glad she hadn’t slept with him those times she went out with him. He was too old, for one thing.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what to do, and you’ll be fully protected,” he was saying.

  “I don’t know if I can handle this.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”

  “You didn’t tell me about this before.”

  “Just act normal. Nobody knows who you are.”

  She hung up the phone and sped eggshell fragments down the garbage disposal. She turned on her late movie and double-checked the chain on the door. Andrew was in outer space, she thought. She couldn’t imagine a serious drug problem at the restaurant. The bar was so relaxed, the clientele upscale, the waiters so correct. She wondered about Boyd and Jim, the rock-and-roll busboys. They belonged to a band called Exact Change Lane. Boyd used to work in Texas, and he had chatted with Annie about how Dallas had changed. Annie hadn’t realized it had changed. The only time she was in Dallas there had been a horrible crash on the highway because of the blinding sunset reflections off one of the gold-glass buildings on the outskirts of the city. Boyd and Jim acted a bit haughty because they played in a band, but Annie liked most of the people she worked with. She had gone for drinks with some of the staff a few times after work. They were beer drinkers, except for Yvonne, who liked rusty nails for their sweetness. Yvonne had black Diana Ross hair and wore huge amounts of amethyst jewelry. Annie went out for ice cream with another waitress who confided she was having an affair and her husband didn’t suspect. Annie felt like a rat, reporting the woman’s secret to Andrew, who wasn’t even interested. Everyone asked Annie, “How do you like Atlanta?” and everyone said Atlanta was on the move.

  Andrew kept assuring her that the important thing was to keep an open mind. So she reported the times people were tardy; petty complaints and moods; the bartender’s mournful commentaries about his wayward daughter. She had to be sharp. Every moment should be like this, she thought, surging inside with a sort of lust for something filling and indefinable—life. The feeling was a little goofy, she thought, so she didn’t tell Andrew. And she didn’t report Wes’s jokes, or the way he smiled when he saw her coming toward him as if he were startled by a pleasant memory. She didn’t mention the insect bites on his neck—he had been camping in Oconee National Forest and got drenched in a storm. Annie was struck by such a desire to go camping that she found herself digging into the lawyer’s closets for a look at his camping gear.

  Comments she overheard among the staff:

  “She was water-skiing and her bladder fell out.”

  “Chicken is on all the diets. It must be low in everything.”

  “I’m going to get my hide tacked to the wall if I don’t get home early.”

  “Mom always puts my clothes in the destruct cycle of the dryer and they come out doll clothes.”

  “Did you know you can make lip gloss in a microwave? Mix lipstick with petroleum jelly and zap it on high.”

  Was there a clue? Something she was missing?

  Her weekends were Mondays and Tuesdays. On Monday, she awoke with the five-o’clock boom somewhere in the building, then drifted back into a vague sunlit sleep. She dreamed about Scott, his image as clear as a long-distance voice on the telephone when one says in surprise, “You sound like you’re in the next room.” Scott had long skinny arms and a face like a terrier, with brown-and-white mottled fur. In the dream it was called pinto fur. She began to wake up. He would have been waiting for her last night, she thought, working out her story about the weekend to tell Wes and the others. While she was out shopping he would catch up on some of his paperwork—on his little laptop in her living room—and then they would go see about getting her a dog. Scott didn’t like dogs, though.

  Now it was ten o’clock, and the radio was yammering away at her. The Rolling Stones update. “Only days away . . . Build a box . . . Your little home away from home . . . Bring it to our studio and be one of three lucky ones whose boxes are chosen . . . The only rule is you cannot get out for twenty-four hours, so you figure out what luxuries and conveniences you want in your little mini-condo there. Ha ha. Come on, you Georgia peaches out there! The Stones are rolling into Atlanta pretty real soon!” The song “Mixed Emotions” drove her fully awake. She felt something urgent calling her from deep within, like a creature who had fallen into a cistern.

  The telephone was ringing.

  “Annie? It’s Wes. Did I wake you up?”

  “That’s O.K.” She turned down the radio.

  “Hey, I’ve got an extra pair of Stones tickets for you. I promised them to my little cousins, Barb and Jan, but now their mama won’t let them come all the way from Alabama. They’re seventy-five apiece, and you can have them at cost. I wouldn’t try to scalp you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if Scott can go.” She felt how sharp she was to remember Scott so quickly, on the spot.

  “When can you find out?”

  “Oh, I want to go anyway. I’d love to go.”

  “What about the other ticket?”

&nb
sp; “I’ll buy both of them,” Annie said quickly. “If he can’t go, I have an old college friend in Chattanooga. I’m sure Tina would give anything to go.”

  “The seats are up on the third tier but straight across from the stage. They should be great.”

  “Thanks, Scott. This is wonderful.”

  “Scott? You called me Scott,” Wes said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Wes. I’m really sorry.”

  “Annie, I know you don’t know me very well, but I’ve got a feeling about you.”

  “What’s that?” She grabbed the edge of her pillow, rubbing the material together. The edges of the lawyer’s pillowcase were embroidered with little blue chickens.

  Wes said, “I guess you think I’m too forward, but when I moved to Atlanta, I met so many people who were wrapped up in themselves, they couldn’t bother to be considerate, so I vowed I’d be friendly and helpful to others like myself who came here from out of town.”

  “I really appreciate that, Wes. You’ve been real nice to me.”

  “What are you and Scott doing today?”

  “Oh, I have to look for an apartment.” Andrew had told her to say she was looking for an apartment, so she would sound permanent.

  “Well, let me know if I can help you out. And I’ll give you those tickets Wednesday at work.”

  “Thanks, Wes. Talk to you later.”

  She threw a chicken-trimmed pillow at the wall, wishing she had invented a different excuse for settling in Atlanta—an institutionalized mother would have been good. Was there a Betty Ford branch on the East Coast?

  At the animal shelter that afternoon, Annie chose the first dog she saw, a young shepherd mix. When the dog’s gaze caught her eyes, he seemed to recognize her, and she didn’t know how she could reject a dog she had communicated with that way. When she offered him her hand, he sniffed it shyly. His black-tipped ruff was sensuous and thick, like a heavy rug. Out on the street, pulling on the leash she had brought, he carried his tail in a way that made her think of Mick Jagger prancing across the stage.