WHERE TROUBLE SLEEPS

by Clyde Edgerton

  WHERE TROUBLE SLEEPS

  CLYDE EDGERTON

  ALSO BY CLYDE EDGERTON

  Clyde Edgerton

  Raney

  Walking Across Egypt

  The Floatplane Notebooks

  Killer Diller

  In Memory of Junior

  Redeye

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office BOX 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225 a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  ©1997 by Clyde Edgerton.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Bonnie Campbell.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Parts of this novel appeared in slightly different form in The Oxford American, The Carolina Quarterly, and Best American Short Stones, 1997.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Edgerton, Clyde, 1944—

  Where trouble sleeps : a novel / by Clyde Edgerton. p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56512-061-2 I. Title.

  PS3555.D47W44 1997

  813'.54—dc21 97-3151

  CIP

  10 98765432 1 First Edition

  For Mike Ennis.

  And in memory of the grandstand and the gym.

  The fundamental order of ideas is first a world of things in relation, then the space whose fundamental entities are defined by means of these relations and whose properties are deduced from the nature of those relations.

  —Alfred North Whitehead

  We had to lire united with a wild beast whom it was important not to know.

  —Francois Mauriac

  MEPHISTOPHELES COMES TO MAYBERRY

  LISTRE, NORTH CAROLINA, 1950

  Population: 511

  Local businesses: one grocery, one filling station, one hardware store, one variety store, one barbershop, one auto shop/grill, one motor court

  Predominant church affiliation: Southern Baptist

  Number one community concern: increased congestion at community center crossroads

  Progress was in the making in Listre. After a head-on mule and truck collision, Listre petitioned the state highway department for the blinker light. It helped.

  But it also put Listre on the map. Soon outsiders were passing through. And before long, one of them (driving a stolen car) decided to take a cabin at The Settle Inn.

  For his seventh novel, Clyde Edgerton returns to the setting of his own childhood to introduce us to the good God-fearing citizens of small town America at mid century—good ole boys, good little boys, little old ladies with loaded shot guns, and an ancient dog who predicts the weather—and to tell the story of what happened back when rootless amorality met up with deep-rooted moral flexibility.

  We all miss the slower pace and simpler problems of the '50s, and no one brings them back better than Clyde Edgerton, a writer described by The New York Times as "Eudora Welty meets Mark Twain." And no one exposes the secrets of self-righteousness more cheerfully than he does. His is the uncanny art of getting inside our hearts and minds to show us how to love ourselves, even so.

  Clyde Edgerton is the author of six previous novels, including bestsellers Raney and Walking Across Egypt. Born, raised, and educated in North Carolina, he has taught English and writing at several Southern colleges and universities and has spoken on dozens of campuses where his fiction is pan of the curriculum. Also a musician, Edgerton is, with his wife, Susan Ketchin, a founding member of the Tarwater Band.

  CONTENTS

  PART I: Summer Rain at the Blinker Light

  Send Me to the Electric Chair

  Big Top Grape

  Church Home

  Whiskey and Milk

  PART II: The Man in the Buick Eight

  A Spitnew Face

  Church Work

  The Collision Story

  Chicken's Eye

  Faint Yellow

  Shovel Prints

  Dirty Energy

  An Accident

  PART III: Just as I Am

  Salvation

  Where Trouble Sleeps

  The Gypsy Man's Tea

  PART I

  Summer Rain at the Blinker Light

  SEND ME TO THE ELECTRIC CHAIR

  Alease toomey sat at her dresser, putting on lipstick, getting ready to take her son up to see the electric chair for the first time. She blotted her lips on a Kleenex, reached for her comb. Her dresser top held the basics only—a jar of Pond's cold cream, a bottle of Jergens lotion, Elizabeth Arden rouge and lipstick, hand mirror, hairbrush—all on a starched white table doily.

  She thought about little Terry Daniels, just down the road. Why not take him along, too? Seeing the electric chair might be especially good for him, and certainly his mother wouldn't be taking him up there. And it would be nice for Stephen to have some company along.

  She blotted her lipstick again on the Kleenex, softened the glare.

  Terry's mother, inez, squinted through the door screen. As Mrs. Toomey explained the purpose of the trip, Inez considered the dress Mrs. Toomey was wearing, a clean white dress with big blue flowers. Mrs. Toomey's hair was shiny and had nice waves in it, and little Stephen was so neat, wearing pressed navy blue shorts and a yellow shirt with a collar, his hair pushed back in front with that butch wax it looked like. She didn't have Terry's pants ironed. But he had some that was clean. Somewhere back in there.

  As Mrs. Toomey talked, Inez began to realize that what Mrs. Toomey was about to do was exactly right for Terry at this time in his little dragged-along, up-and-down life. Her hand touched the screen. She looked over her shoulder and said, "Terry, go get on some pants and shoes. Find some clean pants and a shirt." Boy would go naked to the grocery store if he had a chance. She'd done blistered his ass twice for running naked in the yard. Last time was yesterday when she saw him standing on that tire, pissing in the hole.

  "We'll just wait out here in the swing," said Mrs. Toomey, in the swing, Stephen sat next to the wall and held his mother's hand. His feet didn't reach the porch floor. The chain creaked up at the ceiling. He looked across the hot paved road at the gas station—Trains Place. He knew to take his eyes away. Train's Place was where men drank beer and said bad words. Stephen knew the evil names of two beers: Schlitz and Blatz.

  Through the window screen near his elbow he saw the foot of a bed, a rumpled white sheet. He'd never seen an unmade bed in the daytime. The unmade bed made the room seem wild. He heard Mrs. Daniels's voice in there: "Where's 'at other sock?"

  "I 'on't know."

  "Didn't you have it on yesterday?"

  "No."

  "Do you want me to whup you?"

  "No."

  "You say No ma'am."

  "No ma'am."

  "You say No ma'am to Mrs. Toomey, you hear? She's taking you up to see the electric chair, and you listen to what she says and don't you take them shoes off, or nary piece of your clothes ... Do you hear?"

  "Yes... Yes ma'am."

  As they got in the car, Terry's sister, Cheryl, rode up on her bicycle, leaned it against the steps, and waved to Mrs. Toomey and Stephen, The way Cheryl was shaped all over, the way her head and her body came together like an angel, made her look to Stephen like the woman who came to him when he was almost dead on the desert after he'd been fighting Ind
ians. Cheryl sometimes talked to him when he sat on the porch steps at the grocery store. She would sometimes even sit down beside him.

  Alease let Stephen and Terry sit in the backseat together. That way they could talk, and she could kind of hear what they talked about.

  "Did you know Mr. Jacobs's got a electric paddle in his office?" Terry asked Stephen.

  "Terry honey," said Alease, "I don't think that's true about a electric paddle. I think somebody made that up."

  "That's what Leland said."

  "Well, I don't believe that's true. That's a rumor. A rumor is something that's not true. Not usually true."

  Stephen rolled his little metal car up and down his leg and across the seat.

  "Can I play with that?" Terry asked Stephen.

  Alease looked in the rearview mirror. "Stephen. Let Terry play with your car."

  The strong, acrid odor from the fertilizer factory came in through the open windows.

  Stephen handed his toy car to Terry and said, "I got about five more."

  They bumped over the railroad tracks, past a row of shotgun houses, some with flowers on the porch.

  "I got a big wood one," said Terry. "Leland's got a real one with wheels on it that come offen a scooter."

  They drove past the Dairy DeeLight—where June Odum, a neighbor, worked part-time. Alease decided they might stop by on the way back for a little reward if Stephen and Terry behaved. She wasn't against a little reward for herself, either.

  "Now, the reason we're going to see the electric chair," said Alease, "is so you-all can see what will happen if you ever let the Devil lead you into a bad sin. They'll put you in the electric chair and electrocute you. And little sins can lead up to big sins."

  They drove past red clay road banks, past green pastures with cows, wood outbuildings, fishing ponds, some pastures holding a line or two of thick black-green cedar trees. They passed a man in a dark gray business suit changing a flat tire.

  Just east of Birmingham, Alabama, big splotchy raindrops hit the dusty windshield of a northeast-bound, black, four-door, almost new, stolen 1950 Buick Eight. Jack Umstead looked for the wiper knob, found it. He was very satisfied with the feel of this big Buick. The horn sounded like it weighed a hundred pounds. He kept patting the dashboard, and when he'd stopped for coffee in the sunshine, before the rain started, he had walked around the front of the car and touched the chrome hood ornament. It was shaped like a rocket ship. The heavy wipers worked with a clean, wide sweep—wider than any he'd ever seen—and at two speeds, fast and slow. He needed the fast. In fact, it was raining so hard he might pull over and stop for a few minutes. He didn't need a wreck, and the nose of some highway patrolman sticking in his window.

  Back at the blinker light, Inez sat in her big soft chair inside the house where she could look out from the comfortable darkness. She picked up her L&M from the ashtray. She liked to sit in her big chair and prop her feet on the cane-bottomed chair, with her smokes, matches, and ashtray on the little round table beside her. She liked to look out through the screen door from back in there where it was dark. She liked to watch the men over at Train's Place, drinking beer and talking. Beyond that she could see what was going on over at the grocery store.

  Sometimes she went back to bed. She didn't like to cook especially and they didn't have company anymore now that Johnny had started drinking again. So sometimes she just gave up and slept. She deserved it. She'd had a hard time keeping her family going, except for Cheryl, who had made it all the way through high school and was turning out all right. She hadn't heard from her oldest son, Todd, in months. He was somewhere in Memphis, working at a gas station, he'd said.

  As they pulled in and parked, Stephen's mother said, "See how big the building is? That's because there's so many prisoners."

  Stephen looked at the tall fence beside the walkway—with barbed wire along the top—at the giant brick building, bigger than the hospital, sitting below a quiet blue sky with moving clouds so white they almost hurt his eyes. He reached for his mother's hand.

  "See up there?" she said. "If they try to escape, that guard will shoot them. That's a shotgun he's got."

  Stephen knew a gun would shoot an Indian and they'd fall down before they had a chance to go scalp a white man. He'd never seen a scalping close up in a movie. He wondered what it looked like up close. Did they get every bit of the hair, or just a hunk from the top? Why did that kill you? Why didn't a big scab just come?

  The guard at the double gate said, "Yes ma'am. What can I do for you? Hey there, boys."

  "I'm Mrs. Harvey Toomey. I called ahead to see about y'all showing these boys the electric chair."

  "Oh, yes ma'am. We got a note about that." He opened one large gate, then another. "Just push the buzzer at that second door and Buddy'll let you in. How old are you boys?"

  "Seven and a half," said Terry.

  "Six and a half," said Stephen.

  "This one's mine," said Alease. She touched Stephen's head.

  These men in uniforms, Stephen knew, found lost dogs, fed milk to babies. On the outside—in their faces—they looked kind of hard, but inside they were perfect. They were prison guards. Maybe he'd be a prison guard when he grew up, stand up there in that high room at the top of the fence and hold a shotgun all day long and then go home to his wife for a good supper. And if he got in a fight with the prisoners and got shot, his beautiful wife dressed in white would rush to him, kneel over him, take care of him and talk to him. She would rub his forehead with a damp, white cloth.

  After the boys and mother were gone, the tower guard asked down to the gate guard, "What'd she say?"

  "Show them boys the electric chair." He shook a Lucky Strike up out of a pack, lit it with a flip-top lighter that had a rising sun on the side. "They won't but six and s'em year old."

  "I wish I'd brought Dennis up here once a year or so from the time he was about two years old. Maybe he'd a stayed in school and made something out of hisself."

  "You can't ever tell. When'd he drop out?"

  "Eleventh ... tenth. Somewhere in there. I think he made it to the eleventh in some subjects. He never did get a chance to play football because he couldn't get up to a damn C average."

  "That's a rule that never made no sense to me. What the hell difference does it make what your average is if the only thing you know how to do is play football?"

  "Yeah. Well, that was pretty much Dennis's story. Still is. He's thirty-one years old and the only thing he still knows how to do as far as I know is play football. But it's doing him less and less good, I'll tell you that."

  "He still driving the drink truck?"

  "Yeah."

  "He can do that, can't he?"

  "Oh yeah."

  "Well . , ." The guard took a draw, blew smoke. "A man needs a skill."

  "Yeah. That's for sure. But I'll tell you one thing: Some skills are better than others."

  "Well, yeah, that's true. That's true."

  Inside the prison, a guard led Stephen, his mother, and Terry through a big metal door, several other doors, and finally to a thick door with an eye-level window about the size of a saltine cracker box.

  "You boys come on over here and I'll show you the switch first. My name's Sergeant Floyd." Stephen noticed that he walked with a big limp. "Here it is. Now. There's the white, which is off. The green means ready. And the red is zap. Now the executioner can't see the prisoner from here, you see. Here, stand on this stool."

  Stephen looked, saw a chair made of dark shiny wood, not as big as he thought it would be, on a low platform. Straps hung to the chair arms and legs and a light-colored canvas bag hung from the top of the chair back.

  His mother looked over his shoulder.

  "What's that bag?" he asked.

  "That's what they put over his head," said Sergeant Floyd, "so you can't see his face when he gets fried. That's something you don't want to see."

  "Let me see," said Terry.

  "Let's let Terry see," said S
tephen's mother. She placed her hands under Stephen's arms and lifted him down.

  Terry stepped up, looked in through the window. "Where's the electric paddle?" he said.

  "Oh, they just got them at school," said Sergeant Floyd. He looked at Stephen's mother and winked. "Now, this chair though—our bad people up here use this chair twicet... first time and last time." He looked at Stephen, winked again.

  Stephen pictured an electric paddle—something shiny metal about the size of a lawnmower set up on the corner of a big desk. You bent over in front of it and a metal paddle hooked to the side of it went rat-tat-tat-tat-tat about a hundred miles an hour.

  "I don't think you can teach them too soon," said his mother.

  Inside the dairy DeeLight, Alease saw June Odum waiting behind the serving window. She wore a little white Seal-test ice cream hat. It seemed as if June's big sad face—as round as the moon, with dark bags beneath her eyes—filled up the entire little window.

  "How y'all?" said Mrs. Odum. Her whole body, everything about her, seemed sloped downward somehow—lines out from her eyes and her mouth, her shoulders, all sloped downward.

  "Just fine, June. How you doing today?" Alease placed her purse on the counter. "Y'all go on over and sit down, son."

  "Oh, I'm doing all right, I reckon," said June.

  "We want to order three banana splits. These boys have been real good today."

  June pulled three bananas from a bunch in a fruit bowl and began her work. She picked up her lit Pall Mall from a miami Florida ashtray and took a draw. The cigarette tip brightened, then dimmed. She moved slowly, as if she were underwater. She made the little grunting sounds she always made while she worked. "Where y'all been? Mmph."