by Neal Bowers
Beyond Uncle Oscar’s prophetic arm, Davis glimpsed his bag about to disappear through the plastic strips at the far end of the conveyor, and bolted to grab it, skating the last few feet on the slick tile, feeling almost giddy.
“It would’ve been back, son; no need to break your neck. What goes around comes around.”
By the time they found the car in the parking garage and drove through the toll gate, Oscar had expanded considerably upon his don’t-ask-because-God’s-not-telling theology. Davis imagined a bumper sticker for Oscar’s puttering car: HE’S GOD, THAT’S WHY. Might be a useful idea for the flight back to Des Moines—the inventor of stickers for all beliefs, including nonbelief—WAVE IF YOU’RE JESUS. Who would be the first to signal? And what would happen then?
Davis had never known how Oscar got the call. Whether he actually heard a voice or simply had a feeling wasn’t clear, probably not even to Oscar, who always said, “I just knew what the Good Lord wanted me to do and I done it.” Could have been indigestion or maybe a small cerebral hemorrhage. God’s tuning in to Oscar’s frequency and giving him a life mission was too scary to contemplate.
“Your mama was a good woman, son, a good woman; and she’s in heaven right now, with Jesus. Because everything was right between her and the Good Lord. Oh, I know she was quick-tempered and said things sometimes, but in her heart she was good. She done the best she could.”
Davis marveled that “preachy old windbag” wasn’t audible, his thoughts telepathically penetrating Oscar’s denseness. Davis concentrated: Oscar, if you hear me, honk the horn. This is God. Honk if you hear me. Oscar clicked the headlights on to high beam. “Almost,” Davis mused, as the car passed the fringe lighting of the city and headed into darkness.
Davis tracked the headlights as they raced the pavement, the car winding out of Nashville and climbing the west side of the Cumberland Basin. He remembered making this trip with his parents on the old highway, stopping once for hamburgers at a malt stand in Germantown on the very top of the hill. Now there wasn’t even a sign on the interstate for the little settlement, everything bypassed and left to clog from disuse.
“Can we get something to eat? I didn’t have much on the plane.”
“Lordy, son, there’s enough food at home to feed everyone in Montgomery County. Can’t you hold out for another half hour?”
How could he explain to one-answer Oscar that when the diabetic’s brain says eat it means now. Probably what had happened in the airport was making him overcautious. Maybe his blood sugar level was off the high end of the scale, as sometimes happened when he mistook highs for lows. Still, he was hungry. His head fell back against the seat as his father’s death returned in a vision of potato salad, fried chicken, pot roasts, three-bean salad, corn bread, ham, turnip greens, and every kind of pie imaginable. The house foundered with food, and everyone who stopped by to pay respects was fed, people sitting with paper plates on their knees, the food giving them something to talk about, or filling their mouths so they didn’t have to speak of death.
As Davis’s ears popped with the incline, he knew Germantown was somewhere off to the left, blocked out by trees and limestone bluffs, its little burger stand in ruins on a highway no one used anymore. Uncle Oscar’s voice, droning about the sweet bosom of our Lord, and the car’s engine melded, holding a soporific pitch that matched the tired humming in Davis’s bones, making him want to close his eyes and sleep. He always rested well whenever he came here, and it nettled him to think he might have been meant to stay in Tennessee, where something soothing invited him to lie down. Or was it sinister, serpentine, the old entanglements of southern blood?
“Have some of my french fries,” his mother said from the backseat, handing the paper sleeve over Davis’s shoulder. “I can’t eat ’em all, and I’m sure you’re hungry after your trip. Hard to beat the fries at that little place in Germantown.”
“You say something?” asked Uncle Oscar. “I thought you were asleep.”
“Uh, no, nothing,” said Davis, clearing his throat. “Sorry. Just dozed off for a minute, I guess.”
“More like twenty, I’d say. We’re nearly to the Clarksville exit.”
Even in the dark, the landscape was familiar: rolling hills covered with scrubby cedars, here and there a limestone outcropping or red-clay gully. Davis felt the old connection and detachment coming on: like the flash of intimacies upon meeting a former lover, the awkward amenities and the sure knowledge that nothing could ever be as it was. But how was it, exactly, beyond the myth and wishfulness? What blood ritual made him forever southern? Even as a boy, he thought of himself as southern, a mark of pride, a fine old family name—one of the Southerners.
“How’s it feel to be home?” Uncle Oscar intruded, as though still receiving messages from Davis’s mind.
“Home?” The word was pure exhalation, a blow to the diaphragm, the kind of word that could be final, the last breath of the dying. Clarksville had sprawled in the last nine years, and streets with unfamiliar names flashed by the window. To Davis, it was still a little river town with a Piggly Wiggly grocery and Ben Franklin five-and-dime, still the place where soldiers from Fort Campbell’s 101st Airborne division came across the Kentucky state line to get drunk and scuffle with the local boys over women. Home.
“I’ll run you by our place for something to eat and then carry you on over to your mama’s,” Oscar offered.
“No, no, that’s all right. I’m not hungry anymore,” he lied. “Besides, I’m sure I can find something to snack on at home.” There was that word again, sudden as a twitch.
“There won’t be much, son. You know how your mama was about food.”
“No,” Davis said, baiting his uncle, “how was she?”
“Let’s just say she was a picky eater.” Oscar’s deft sidestepping surprised Davis, and they fell silent until the intersection of the street where Oscar and Aunt Goldie lived. “Sure you won’t change your mind? We’ve got pecan pie so good it’ll make your tongue knock your eyeteeth out.” Davis’s grunt and nod could have been interpreted either way, but Oscar read them as rejection and drove on without protest.
As the car crept away from the curb, Davis stood in his mother’s front yard, knowing the old man didn’t really want him at his house. Strange to be dumped. Should be on the other end of the process, Oscar standing in a dark ditch outside of town, fighting his rage with false forgiveness as Davis screeched away.
The night air made him feel better—early April, a richness in the breeze, the scent of everything stirring. Across the street, a dogwood tree in full bloom generated its own light, soft and cold, like the moon’s. Walking around the house, looking at the windows and the dark roofline, Davis laughed when he saw his mother’s old car hulking in the driveway. He sauntered around it, smiling when he thought of his nickname for it, the Trackless Tank. But even derision couldn’t persuade her to get a smaller car, something she could parallel park. “If I’m in a wreck, I don’t want them to have to pry me loose from the metal,” she would say. “Give me a big car with plenty of hood out in front.”
Imagining he was a car thief, Davis quietly tried the doors and wondered if locking them had been one of his mother’s last acts. His throat tightened, and he kicked one of the tires so hard a kind of voltage ran up his leg and his toes went numb.
Through the windows he saw a plastic rain scarf on the front seat—“my shower cap,” she used to say—and a paperback book, lying facedown. Probably titled Tempestuous Love or Passionate Affair. His mother inhaled cheap romances, reading them even at stoplights, the cars behind beeping when the red went green.
Continuing around the house, Davis was startled by something at the far end of the backyard. It looked like someone bent over to tie a shoe. As he drew near, it became a lawn mower. Stopped exactly at the end of a single mown strip, it waited for someone to turn it around and finish the job. He poked the almost empty bag with his tingling foot.
When the back light came on at th
e house next door, Davis stepped into the shadows. He could see a face in the kitchen window, the neighbor sighting down the spotlight beam that ignited her weedy lawn. His mother had probably checked out noises the same way, and this was how she looked to the burglar, the voyeur, the murderer. When the light went out, Davis knew the face was still there, even though he couldn’t see it. She was waiting for him to move, but her mind would quickly reason him away. He was only her imagination or the wind. Stiffening himself in the darkness, he felt invisible, dangerous.
The front door swung open to the unmistakable smell of ammonia, and Davis stopped just inside. His mother had never been much of a housekeeper, so it was hard to imagine her scouring the oven or scrubbing some corner of her yellowed kitchen floor. With the streetlight’s illumination through the open door, Davis could make out newspapers scattered on the sofa and an afghan piled on the floor, as if his mother had just stood up to greet him, letting it slide off her lap.
When he turned on the light, the room he knew by heart materialized, with its salmon-colored carpet and matching end-table lamps made of old porcelain jugs, the coffee table piled with magazines. At the far end, a wall covered with photographs outlined in a flash of moments the story of his life through all its gawky, awkward stages, right up until he left for Des Moines nine years ago.
A small motor whined somewhere behind him—the VCR recording. When he turned on the set, the screen slowly filled with the watercolor look of a fifties movie, thin pigments a good rain might wash off, returning everything to black and white, a man and a woman arguing in a sports car. Davis muted the sound and watched them drive along, their mouths moving in what could have been song; then he hummed a mock finale and, with an operatic flourish, killed the picture.
In the refrigerator, he found a package of American cheese and a mayonnaise jar filled with tea—“Made by Mama,” he thought, holding up the garnet liquid to study it in the overhead light. A search of the kitchen cabinets turned up plain crackers, so he peeled the cellophane wrapping off four slices of cheese, broke each one into quadrants, and made a small stack of the squares, alternating them with crackers, just as he had done as a child.
“Playing with your food again,” his mother would say, in a tone halfway between question and allegation. “At least get a plate to put things on.”
Davis balanced his tower on a saucer and went back into the living room. The most recent newspaper was two days old. He knew his mother would have bought it at the Quick Shop on her way home from work. “No sense in paying extra to have it delivered,” she’d say.
The headline was vintage Clarksville: MAYOR FILES PEACE BOND AGAINST POLITICAL FOE. Underneath, exactly in the middle of the page, was a photo of a mangled car with the caption “Two killed in early morning accident. Story page 3.” Davis leafed through to read the unfamiliar names.
Had he stayed in Clarksville, would he grieve for these people? Would he take sides in the mayor’s fight with the opponent who had threatened to “reach down his lyin’ throat and jerk him inside out”?
Davis swallowed a square of cheese and shook his head, remembering when he finally gave up trying to live in the same town with his parents and relatives. Having his own duplex apartment here hadn’t been the same as having his own life, because someone, usually his mother, was always dialing his number or standing on the front steps ringing the bell. Looking back, he realized he had been little more than a kid on an extended outing, especially after his marriage failed. He had let Linda have all the furniture and then camped out inside the shell of their former home.
When the phone crashed his thoughts, Davis stood up so quickly he banged his shin on the coffee table and sent the empty saucer wobbling on edge across the room like a lost wheel.
Trying to recover his breath, he stood next to the phone in the hallway and rubbed his throbbing leg, finally answering to a voice that said, “Praise the Good Lord, you’re all right.” It was Aunt Goldie, who normally would have been in bed three hours earlier. She had obviously stayed up to monitor Davis’s activities while deciding which jewelry to wear with her black funeral dress.
“You been running, Davis? You sound plumb out of breath.”
“No, no, I’m all right. Just sitting here reading the paper and thinking about going to bed.”
“I called you four or five times after Oscar got back. Why didn’t you answer?”
“I was on the back steps, looking at the stars and getting a little air. Airplanes are so stuffy.” He lied to avoid the burden of explaining why he’d stalled so long before coming inside. Anyhow, he wasn’t sure he could make sense of it. “Why are you still up?”
“Worried sick about you, child. You should have stopped here for something to eat. You’d have slept better.”
“No chance of not sleeping tonight,” he said, faking a loud yawn. “See what I mean?”
“Well, get in the bed and rest up for tomorrow. We’ll see you over here in the morning for biscuits and gravy. All right?”
Davis held the line, but when Goldie queried a second time, he had no choice but to answer yes.
His mother’s bed was the only one in the house, since Davis’s had been removed years ago and his old room turned into a large storage closet. At Christmas and on other occasions, he slept compacted on the sofa. Now there was no reason not to be more comfortable. When he opened the bedroom door, he saw the bed was unmade, left just the way his mother had rolled out of it the last time.
In the bathroom, he located the source of the ammonia smell, an opened bottle of drain cleaner beside the toilet. He poured the contents into the bowl and flushed.
After brushing his teeth, he checked the doors. “Still the same old worrier, aren’t you?” He could imagine his mother standing behind him in pajamas and bathrobe. “Even when you were a little boy you traipsed through the house every night, making sure the screens were latched and all the doors locked tight.”
It was true. He was compulsive—about securing the doors, especially—believing the responsibility fell solely on him. No one else knew how to test the locks by turning the doorknobs the correct number of times and tugging with the right amount of force. Sometimes, after everyone had gone to bed, he would slip through the house to check the doors again, unable to sleep until the ritual had been performed in a way that felt completely satisfying.
From his diabetic kit, Davis took a tube of glucose tablets and his blood sugar monitor and placed them on the night table. Although he normally slept in only a T-shirt and underwear, he put on his pajamas, as he always did when visiting his mother, and slid beneath the covers before he could act on the impulse to take them off.
The sheets were pilly, and the pillowcase smelled of hair spray. As he shifted from one side to the other, tipping on the brink of sleep, something beneath the covers touched his back. For a moment he held still, trying to decide if he was dreaming; but the blood roaring through his head convinced him he was awake. At the small of his back, just above his hips, something pressed lightly.
Davis swung the covers off and cartwheeled out of bed, slapping the wall to find the light switch near the doorway. Trying to slow his heart and breath, he turned and saw a pillow, placed halfway down one side of the bed. In an instant, he understood its purpose—something to fill the space, not a surrogate bedmate but something tactile under the covers, a point of reference other than the self when the light went out.
After his father’s death, Davis’s mother had insisted she was all right alone; over the years, she had never seemed afraid. But now he felt neglectful and selfish. He stood for a long time, seeing his mother pressed up against her secret companion or stretching an arm across it in her sleep.
Tugging the blankets off the bed, he dragged them into the living room and spread them on the sofa. Knowing it was late, he turned to look at the clock, but he couldn’t see it in the dark, couldn’t see anything as he remembered how his mother always called from her room, “Good night, darlin’; sleep tight.�
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CHAPTER 3
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BUCK OWENS WAS singing “. . . and all I gotta do is act naturally” when Davis untangled himself from sleep and remembered he was in his mother’s house. “She’ll be fixing breakfast,” he thought. But as he swung around to sit up on the sofa, the emptiness embraced him, the cold envelopment of the original news. This time, though, he wasn’t taking it well, wasn’t as stoic and composed as when the call came just one day ago. After that, time had somehow lagged, enlisting him to drag its load of seconds, minutes, hours up a sharp incline. Yesterday should be a blur in the valley but was, instead, a near-miss boulder tumbled onto the path immediately behind him.
“It’s six-twenty in Clarksville, Gateway to the New South, on a beautiful spring day, so jump outta that bed and get to it,” a voice said, and then a commercial for Hughes Used Cars screeched out of control.
He followed the breathless voice to the nightstand beside his mother’s bed. A clock radio shone a sickly orange, the disc jockey pattering about tax deadlines and the IRS hiding in the bushes. When Davis pressed the alarm button, 6:00 A.M. flashed across the display. “When she always got up,” he thought, “and when she would have been up today.” He tapped the off button, then leaned over to straighten the sheet, pulling it over the companion pillow, which bulged like someone small and very tired.
Shaved, showered, and on his way to the living room and his suitcase, Davis leaned into the bedroom to see the time. As his eyes scanned past the numbers glowing 7:30, he saw that the sheet was rumpled and the pillow exposed. Frozen in place, clutching the knot of the towel wrapped around him at the waist, he remembered stretching across the bed to make the corners even and and was almost certain he had looked back before leaving the room. Maybe he hadn’t done such a neat job. Then again. . . . “Don’t play games, Mama. I’m not in the mood.” He emphasized every word as though performing an exorcism. Nothing answered.