WHERE TROUBLE SLEEPS

by Clyde Edgerton

  "Yessir."

  "Well, well. Then they gone now?"

  "Yessir."

  "I see. How you know all this?"

  "My mama cuts their toenails." He saw Miss Bea's long second toes. She'd tell him that that meant she was supposed to be rich, and then she'd laugh.

  "Okay."

  "They got a pen of chickens down in the gully. And they got fifteen cats. They shoot their chickens with a four-ten."

  "You sure it's fifteen?"

  "Yessir."

  "Shoot their chickens?"

  "Yessir."

  "Well, I remember these two old ladies where I grew up. They ran a store just like that one and they sold little naked chickens that they'd hacked and picked, and every Saturday night they'd go swimming in a pond down behind their store and they'd take off them old black dresses and their ribs showed up green in the moonlight that shined down through them old black trees and they'd jump in the water and swim around naked before the mosquitoes ate them up. What you think about that?"

  "Not but one of the Blaine sisters is skinny."

  "Okay." The man stood, stuck his empty Pepsi bottle in the drink carton. "You keep your nose clean," he said.

  He drove to the Settle Inn, a place he'd noticed a little ways back. The eight small one-room cabins resembled the main building—steep, A-frame roofs, with wide overhangs. Swiss-like. This was going to work out just fine.

  The man, a Bert Sessoms, gave him a fly swatter and a key to cabin 6. He liked this place: Listre. He'd settle on Plan A as the old women's store. He didn't much think he'd find anything better, but he'd learned not to rush.

  On the way back down to Train's Place, he noticed that the flintrock store across the intersection looked yellow-white in the late-afternoon sun. Behind it the sky was still dark with the storm somewhere up the road to the east.

  At Train's he sat on the outside bench under the drive-under and nursed a Blatz. The bench was backed against the brick wall. Trouble was asleep on a doormat in a cardboard box. Two slender iron pillars supported the drive-under roof, and just to the inside of each stood a Gulf gas pump. The floor to the drive-under was concrete and inclined up to the road on his left and down to the road on his right. Around to the side was a pit for engine work.

  Up across the intersection, an old woman and a man came out of the door of the Blaine sisters' store. So the sisters were back. She opened the lid to some kind of long box. She was holding ... an ice pick? Yes. She chipped, then pulled a page of newspaper from under her arm and wrapped up what looked like a nickel block of ice, and handed it to the customer. She was dressed in black and reminded Umstead of his Aunt Prissy. He could still smell her snuff and woodsmoke smell. Another old woman came out, not skinny. Sweeping. Sweeping water. She was dressed in black. There was a garage next to their store, a clothesline with two white sheets on it—they sure enough lived in there, down in the back. There shouldn't be any resistance to speak of, no iron bars. They for sure had a stash in there somewhere, under something, in something. He saw himself kicking in the back door during a rainstorm, saw himself down in there with them cats all around, going through stuff, throwing stuff out on the floor until he found the stash and then hit the road for points north.

  A man over at the barbershop backed out of the door, reached onto the inside wall, and cut off the revolving barber pole, closed the door and locked it, a screen door against his back all the while. A possibility, but he probably took his money home.

  A bell rung on the Blaine sisters' screen door as Umstead entered. Inside was darker than inside the gas station and had a lived-in feel, a musty smell. Cats. A couple of big stuffed house chairs were in there, three cats he could see to count—damn, one with three legs, not even a stump.

  "Come here, kitty ... Well, get under the table then."

  "Can I help you?" It was the skinny one. She'd come up the stairs. She did not seem friendly.

  "You sell licorice?"

  "Sure do."

  "I need three or four sticks. It's getting hard to find."

  "Well, we got some." She opened the sliding candy counter door.

  "How you stay in business with all these other stores around?"

  "We sell licorice, for one thing." She handed him the brown paper bag. "That'll be eight cents. Plus we don't do a lot of fancy stuff. Ice and chickens, mostly."

  "How long you-all been here?"

  "My daddy opened this store in 1909 and it's been open since."

  Umstead paid. "Save on electricity, too, don't you."

  "What's that?"

  "It's good to have electricity, ain't it."

  "It's gone run us outen the ice business. More and more Frigidaires."

  "Yeah, you're right about that. I used to live over the other side of Traveler's Rest, years ago. My cousin—"

  "T.R."

  "What?"

  "I said, 'T.R.' We call it T.R. around here."

  "Oh, yes ma'am. T.R. My cousin wrote me a letter about Train and the mule head-on."

  She came out from behind the counter and started for the door.

  "I said my cousin wrote—"

  "I got to close now if you don't want nothing else. Come back again sometime. Is that a real mustache?"

  "Yes ma'am, it is. It's my cookie duster."

  "You don't say. I never liked hair on a man's face."

  "Better'n hair on a woman's face."

  "What's that?"

  "I said I used to work for a man that shaved his whole head." "That ain't what you said." "What?" "Never mind."

  Bea blaine watched through the door window as smartypants drove away. She watched to see which way he turned at the blinker light. He turned right. She moved to the side window and watched across the back field as he drove on west—but he turned in at the Settle Inn, parked, got out of his car, got something out of the backseat, and went into a cabin.

  Downstairs, she sat down in her rocking chair near Mae, who was still listening to "The Farm Report," about halfway through now. "There's a man staying at the Settle Inn that's got one of them pencil-thin mustaches," she said.

  "How you know he's staying at the Settle Inn?" asked Mae. Her face was big and soft. She was knitting.

  "I saw him drive in there. I thought you were going to say how'd I know he had a mustache?"

  "You could see his mustache all that far?"

  "No. He was upstairs—I just sold him some licorice and then I watched him drive on down to the Settle Inn. He was a smartypants."

  "What'd he want?"

  "I saw his mustache while he was in the store. Some licorice. He's got folks in T.R. he says. But he's too good to stay with them."

  "I don't know what anybody'd want to eat that stuff for."

  "Because they like it."

  "Well, I know that. But I'm saying I don't know why they'd like it."

  "Same as they like anything else," said Bea. "They just like the taste of it."

  "I got so vinegar gives me bad dreams. Awful dreams. I had one last night where I couldn't get home. Nobody would talk to me. Big crowd. Women, men milling around. Couldn't find my handbag. I asked and asked and nobody would help. I went in a bathroom and turned on a big radio in there and that's when I woke up and had the hardest time going back to sleep. I kept tasting that vinegar."

  "Stop eating it."

  "I am," said Mae.

  "Nobody helps nobody no more. We need some help around here."

  "Well, look at Claude T.," said Bea. "He's not no more interested in this store than nothing. I don't know of a man that I ever knew that would have been interested in it. Staying in one place all this time."

  "Papa."

  "Besides Papa."

  "That little Toomey boy seems nice to me," said Mae. "He's got good manners. His mama's seen to that. And he's old enough to do some errands. We could pay him a little something to do some things—some bending-over things, cleaning-up things."

  "Shoot the chickens," said Bea. "I told his daddy he coul
d be our chicken shooter. He's plenty old enough. That little four-ten don't kick to amount to nothing."

  Outside the settle Inn, Umstead unloaded his leather bag, his film projector, and his paper bags of film reels. Next to the road were two chairs and a picnic table, a place he could sit and watch cars pass.

  Inside: a double bed with a blue spread under a folded-up army blanket, two cane-bottomed chairs, a table with water pitcher, glass, big bowl, bar of soap, towel, and washcloth, lamp, a hanging picture of some flowers, and a pot under the bed.

  He took off his pants, laid them across a chair, poured water into the bowl, placed a bar of soap in the water, took off his shirt, and carefully sank it in the water. Normally, while that shirt soaked for a day, he wore his other yellow one, or his only other everyday shirt—a blue and black plaid flannel. He had two pairs of blue jeans, folded, a navy blue pin-striped business suit on a hanger, a pressed white dress shirt in a box, three neckties, and a week's worth of underwear.

  He took off his glasses, socks, underwear, lay down on the bed, naked, put his hands behind his head, and went to sleep.

  When he woke up ten minutes later, he ate his cheese, drank some water straight out of the pitcher, set up his sixteen-millimeter projector, threaded one of his movies and watched it on the wall. It was the one about the farmer's daughter on the hay in the barn when the field hand comes in.

  The films kept him out of trouble with women. He could always make up things in his head but, hell, these films were almost as good as the real thing. Same ones over and over. Would the time ever come, he wondered, when not only could you see it happen, it could really happen with some kind of rubberized electronic woman—happen without you being involved with a actual person, with a personality that would get in the way of everything? Sometimes he thought about retiring and going into that kind of business. Making rubber women. He figured he could plan it all out if he had a partner who could build some kind of tiny motor that would make it go hump, hump, hump.

  He decided to drive around, do his research, see if there were any more stores that looked better than the old ladies'. He drove east toward the intersection, looked at the stores again, thought about how he could always fall back on selling. Selling anything. Hell, if he had to he could sell God. Plenty of people did.

  The afternoon sun was lighting up tree bark like it was on fire. He thought about the time he was on that island off the Texas coast and watched the sun set over the water, his shadow getting longer and longer on the sand down the beach along the surf. When the sun touched the flat horizon, he realized his shadow went not just down along the beach, but on out into space as far as the light of the sun would ever reach. He waved his hand and figured that that shadow with the waving hand would be riding a light wave on out into space and on and on as far away as the stars and then some. That seemed like something some kind of prehistoric tribe might have thought about. When the sun was up above, your shadow didn't go nowhere hardly.

  Yep, he felt pretty comfortable around this little blinker-light community. About as risk-free as you could ask for. He drove past a church, big church. Later on, he would see if a door was open.

  A school was across from the church. He turned in: a ball field and grandstand behind the school, a grandstand like he'd grown up with—with a roof. He'd never seen another grandstand so much like the one in Rolling Fork. How about that? "Home sweet home," he said out loud to himself.

  Up a little hill behind the grandstand was a ... an old one-room school? No, by golly, that was a little church. There was the cross. A little boarded-up church. They'd closed it down and maybe built the big brick one across the road. Or this one had got elbowed out of use. The one he'd gone to in Mississippi was like this one, except wider and a little heftier and had two bell towers in front, and two front doors. He'd climbed up in there with the bell one time when his sister had run away and he'd looked out to see if he could see her. He'd thought God would help him—help him see for a long, long way, see her walking down some road the way she always walked along some road ten steps or so in front of him swinging her arms, and he'd be able to holler out to her. But once he climbed up in there and looked out, he hadn't been able to see anywhere hardly.

  He drove back out to the highway. A sign stood on the front lawn at the school:

  PICTURE SHOW AND POPCORN EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT. 7:30. 25 CENTS TOTAL

  Mr. Weams, in his house behind the church, sitting in the chair beside the couch, called to Mrs. Weams to come help him. His toe was hung in his sock opening. That was the second time that had happened lately. He couldn't bend far enough forward to get it loose, and if he dropped the sock on the floor he wouldn't be able to reach it. Mrs. Weams came from the kitchen and helped him. She'd been peeling potatoes. / At the Pendergrass Grill, Cheryl set a cup of coffee in front of a customer. / Over at Listre Grocery, Big Steve and Harvey slid the heavy wood-slat vegetable baskets off the porch and into the store. / In his backyard, Charles Latham told his bird dog Buck to sit. The dog sat, and Charles rubbed him under the neck, scratched with his fingernails, wondered if he ought to give Buck a bath. His wife complained yesterday about how Buck smelled. Said he smelled like he'd been in something. / Over in T.R., Andrew, the church janitor, walked out to his pigpen carrying a bucket of slop for the pigs. He poured the slop into the trough. His three pigs grunted and slurped. He noticed that the little one had gotten almost as big as the middle one. It was just amazing how animals, with the blessing of God, could grow so fast. He imagined a taste of freshly cooked hot sausage, with egg and hot biscuits, remembered how his uncle wouldn't eat cucumbers because pigs ate them, he said. / Little Steve lay in the feed room on a tight bag of feed, resting on his back, pretending he was on a ship rocking in the ocean. He rolled off one bag and onto another. He heard somebody coming across the feed-room porch. It was his daddy. "Time to go," he said. "Can we stay a little bit longer?" Stephen asked. "No, we got to get on home now." / Train was locking his toolbox and saying to his brother, Luke, "There was this fellow through here from Idaho while you were at lunch, wanted to know if I knew anything about the Civil War. I told him not much. He said six hundred thousand soldiers were killed. Then he said—he said he thought that was a great tribute to the fighting spirit of the American people. I couldn't quite figure that one out." "Well, what the hell do they know in Idaho?" / Vern Goodman was putting his glasses and false teeth in the mailbox where he always put them after work so he wouldn't lose them. It was the only place that worked.

  CHURCH WORK

  Preacher Crenshaw was dealing with a son problem. Marjorie generally dealt with the girl things; he dealt with the boy things. "Now, Paul, this is something that I have needed to talk to you about for some time. Love and sweethearts and romance are a gift from God; something He has given us so that we might have children. You, while you were in there in that bathtub, listened to the Devil speak to you. You were unable to say no. This will not be the last time the Devil will tempt you. And I want you to know that the first thing to do now is repent. I will help you. But first, you have to be willing—you have to want to repent. Do you want to repent for what you have done?" "Yessir."

  "Truly repent?" "Yessir."

  Paul looked down and to the side, at the pattern in the rug—something like a bird's head. He twisted his pajama sleeve in his fingers. He had tightened up inside so that no hurt would get through. He had been caught doing a dreadful sin. He had tightened up all over. The colors he saw in the rug were red and yellow.

  "Truly repent means you won't do it anymore," his father said.

  "Yessir."

  "Do you realize you said that before?"

  "Yessir."

  "Well, then, bow your head with me. Dear God, please look down upon this house and bless us and imbue us with Thy spirit. We have all sinned and come short of Thy commandments. Paul, here tonight, has misused his sex. He has played with himself in ways that do not respect his body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, and thus he has comm
itted an act against You. He has repented to me and now he will repent to You. In Jesus' blessed name. Paul?"

  "Dear God, I'm sorry for what I did. Thank you for Jesus and for all the blessings we have. Bless the sick and afflicted all over the world. I repent for all my sins, especially the one tonight. In Jesus' name, amen."

  "Dear God, hear our prayer. Bless us and keep us. In Thy holy name, amen. Now son, stand up, pull down your pants and turn around."

  Bea blaine said to Mae Blaine as they sat in their places in their sitting room, "We need to put down some planks between here and the chicken pen. You trucked in some mud again."

  "I don't think it was me," said Mae. She was knitting. She thought Bea's face looked more and more like a skull—it was a thought that would emerge to be fought down.

  Bea said, "I don't know who else it could of been. I wipe my feet every time."

  "I do mine, too."

  "You could forget."

  "I guess I could."

  "I didn't track in the mud."

  They were quiet for a minute.

  "Mama wouldn't no more allowed mud in the house than a snake," said Bea.

  "Wonder what she'd thought of Claude T.?"

  "Lord knows she wouldn't have liked that car and that big ring. That is just too much. I wonder if Dorothea has said anything to him about all that."

  "I doubt it. Come on up here, Kitty." Mae lifted her knitting, waited, and then set it back down on the cat's back. "I been thinking. You think Dorothea will get buried beside Claude T., or us?"

  "I don't know. I have thought about it."

  "Well, I have, too. Every now and then."

  "She lived with us a lot longer than him. People are getting bad all over the place about moving off and forgetting family. That fellow in the yellow shirt has got kin over in T.R. and there he is—lived all over everywhere and won't even stay with them and no telling what kind of hardships his family's been through with him gone off somewhere."