Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “You wanna try?” he asked.

  “Oh, no, that’s okay.”

  Over the next half hour, they sat and watched and drank their wine. The loud, hollow sound of the blower reminded Suzanne of the color orange, warm and radiant and strong. She loved witnessing this rebirth of once-doomed consumer goods. Shrink-wrapping meant starting over even after you’d made a mess, a second chance for both buyer and seller, redemption of the sweetest, simplest form.

  Terrance got up to go the bathroom, and John David was snoring, prone on the floor. Standing up, Suzanne looked down at her feet; her left was in the middle of a large sheet of unused shrink-wrap. She bent over, pulled it up from all sides, around her ankle, as if she were wrapping a bottle of wine in cellophane, and then held it in place with a piece of tape around her leg. As Terrance was walking back to the counter, she clicked on the shrink-wrapper and pointed it at her foot, and in seconds the cellophane warmed her toes and arch and hugged her foot like a blood-pressure machine.

  “Very cool, Suzanne!” Terrance said. “Let’s do your legs.”

  “Terrance!”

  “Oh, come on, Suzanne.”

  She lay down on her back and closed her eyes, drowsy and ambivalent from the bottle of wine. He worked his way upward, wrapping her legs together like a mummy’s, then her round belly, her breasts, and, finally, her neck.

  “What’s it feel like?” Terrance asked her.

  “Like nothin’ can happen to me,” Suzanne said. “Like I’m fixin’ to be born, maybe.”

  “Can we finish it?” he asked

  “You mean my face?”

  “I just wanna finish what I started. Here,” he said. Terrance reached over and pulled a red-white-and-yellow-striped straw from the lid of an empty McDonald’s soft-drink cup. “Put this in your mouth to breathe.”

  He gently wrapped her head in the cellophane then lay it back down on the floor. Suzanne suddenly heard the forceful, scorching whine of the blower, and almost instantly her eyes were compressed shut, all smells and sounds disappeared as if she’d suddenly been thrown into deep water. With her only free, working sense, Suzanne felt John David stirring, then sitting up at her side. And then, a bright flash. A picture taken? An extra light being turned on?

  She suddenly felt fingers pulling and tearing at the shrink wrap around her left ear, and it seemed more of an intrusion than a rescue.

  No, she shook her head. No.… Not yet.

  Twenty-one

  Dear Chatter: I do not agree with the board of education for firin’ that bus driver just because he was preachin’ gospel to the children. There is nothing wrong with kids hearin’ some Bible verses on the way home from school. It’ll do them good.

  Dear Chatter: Hey, you native drivers: Green means go! It doesn’t mean fixing to go, it means go.

  Convinced the heart potato was a sign of impending divine intervention, Adrian Braswell continued to shower Donna with inexpensive but thoughtful Christian gifts. He would set them among the russet potatoes, and they looked like some child’s toy that had washed ashore, lying among the surf-polished, pale-brown rocks. The most recent offering was a small pair of white, painted-resin hands in prayer with an adhesive patch on the bottom.

  “I’ve got mine on my medicine cabinet at home, but you can put it anywhere you want to,” he told Donna. “The kids at Piedmont Presbyterian Day School … they keep ’em in their lockers for good luck and to hang their car keys on. But I don’t drive.”

  Donna had realized by now that Adrian was definitely borderline something. He constantly asked simple questions of physics and logic, the kinds of queries that bubble from children to help them understand the natural forces and relationships in their growing world: Why do raw collards feel like rubber? Why are the outsides of radishes red and the insides white?

  “Why do you always keep the bananas so far away from everything else?” he asked.

  “Because,” Donna explained, “bananas give off this special ripenin’ gas of some kind. If you wanna get something ripened fast just stick it in a paper sack with a banana and shut it up tight. Bananas are real good for that.”

  Adrian shook his head. “I can’t get over how much you know about our Lord God’s beautiful creations.”

  Yet Donna also learned that the young man, who still lived at home with his mother, had a gift that was both amazing and valuable to her and Mr. Tom and Kroger. Like some guess-the-weight man in a circus, Adrian possessed a sixth sense for determining the quality and ripeness of any fruit that hid behind a mystifying, thick epidermis.

  Donna spotted this gift first, and one night she and Mr. Tom stayed with Adrian after closing to test this sensory power. They lined up five honeydews, five cantaloupes and five mangoes. Adrian would hold a fruit in his hand, close his eyes then raise and lower the melon or mango as if he were trying to determine its weight, his right eyelid and the stubs on his other arm twitching as he did this. With his pocketknife, Mr. Tom would cut into the chosen fruits to see how he did, and every time Adrian picked the juiciest, sweetest specimen.

  “Are you smelling them?” Mr. Tom asked.

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “It’s gotta be touch,” Donna said.

  “But he’s not using his fingers,” Mr. Tom added.

  For some reason, this ability seemed to intimidate or at the very least irritate Gary Scalamandre, the new assistant manager in the meat department who called Adrian “Fruit Loop.” Fresh from Detroit, Gary was a barrel-chested man with thick mustache and beefy forearms covered in Marine tattoos, and to date he was Mr. Tom’s sole bad hiring choice. Twice Mr. Tom had had to formally reprimand him for sexual comments made on the cutting floor, one about a salami and the other about fresh liver and how it reminded him of aroused women.

  Adrian had gone for a break, and after thirty minutes Donna began to wonder what was keeping him. He was always on time, always dependable—slow as molasses but dependable.

  She found him in the break room, crying in front of his open locker.

  “Adrian …”

  “Miss Donna!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  With his good hand he pointed at the open locker. “Someone took my things, Miss Donna. These ain’t my things.”

  Donna looked into the locker and recognized the Detroit Tigers baseball cap and the big blue jeans with a circle worn into the back pocket from a can of chewing tobacco. She then opened Gary Scalamandre’s smaller locker and found stuffed inside Adrian’s purple cardigan sweater and his bag of lunch and the pear-size stuffed bear that had fallen off someone’s red heart of chocolates in the parking lot that Valentine’s Day.

  “Come on, Adrian!” she said.

  “Miss Donna.”

  Almost jogging to keep up with her furious pace, he followed her out of the lounge, through dairy and into the swinging metal doors that lead into the meat department.

  “Gary Scalamandre!”

  Donna had to yell to be heard over the noise of the wrapping machine, which was covering mounded square gobs of ground chuck in cellophane and stamping them with white adhesive price tags.

  “You need a goddamned hairnet to come in here, you know that.”

  “I’m not gonna be stayin’.”

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “I want Adrian Braswell’s locker back is what I want.” The five others in the room all stopped what they were doing to watch.

  “He don’t need that big-ass locker. Look at me, I’m the man here. I’m the one who needs all that room.”

  “For your information lockers are handed out based on seniority, and Adrian here has eleven years in this store. That’s why he’s got one of the newer lockers.”

  Adrian quickly tried to interrupt, tapping her on the shoulder with his good hand. “Ten,” he whispered. “Miss Donna, I just got ten. It won’t be eleven till August.”

  Gary stepped forward two paces and wiped his hands on the chest of his white apron, already smudged wit
h the blood of lamb. “I run a whole damn department. I deserve that space. I ain’t switchin’ back.”

  “Then I’m gonna do it for you. And I can tell you right now you’re not gonna like where you find all your things.”

  “You’d better stay away from my stuff.”

  “And you’d better start respectin’ other people’s property.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll tell Mr. Tom.”

  Gary folded his arms across his chest and started to nod. A smile grew on his face. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “You think you can act like you’re in charge ’cause you fuck the boss.”

  “What!” Donna screamed. “What did you say?”

  “Come on, pretty girl. Who do you think you’re fooling?”

  Instinctively, Donna looked for a weapon within reach. From the roller conveyer she picked up an unwrapped, green-foam tray of hamburger meat and threw it at him. Gary dodged it easily, and it flew beyond him and landed, meat side down, with a moist smack on the red-tile floor.

  “You’re as low as a catfish, Gary Scalamandre! You need to jump right back in that muddy pond where you came from.”

  “You’re turnin’ me on, baby. Keep talkin’ to me like that. I love it.”

  Donna breathed in deeply to calm herself down. She thought to herself: Be professional, Donna. Use your brain. Hit him where it really hurts.

  She perched her hands on her hips, lowered her voice and smiled. “You know, Gary, you remind me so much of some of the boys I used to go out with.”

  “Oh yeah? Which ones?”

  “These!” she said, extending her pinky until it was erect and pointing at the fluorescent lights overhead.

  Twenty-two

  Dear Chatter: My sister works at the Perry County school office and she tells me it’s the Yankees who are callin’ in to complain about the preacher bus driver. All I can say is we’ve got prayer and you’ve got New York City Murder Capital of the Universe.

  Dear Chatter: I don’t think it looks very professional for a Selby police officer to be driving a police car off duty wearing Bermuda shorts. Thank you very much.

  The features department of the Reflector included Harriet, the oldest by thirty-two years; Margaret, the youngest and newest member; and a group of six women that Randy Whitestone referred to as “the henhouse,” a name born from the warbling noise that would boil over and spill across the glass partition that separated them from the rest of the newsroom. Margaret secretly admitted to herself that the name fit—en masse, their laughter sounded operatic and shrill as a peacock’s call—and sometimes would have to stop herself from putting her hands over her ears. This was true even outside the newsroom. Many times in Selby she had whipped her head around in alarm when she heard three or more Southern women cut up in laughter, just as one does when someone opens a door at the moment an ambulance is screaming past.

  More than once, because she was now writing her popular profiles for the A section, Randy suggested to Margaret that she move to a desk on the other side of the glass wall, among the more cynical, male-dominant metro staff. Margaret did admire the earnest, Chicken Little nature of the news department, and she watched with interest each time they mobilized like fighter pilots after hearing a lead on the police scanner, which sat on a homemade plywood shelf over the metro desk, painted red and black to commemorate the Georgia Bulldogs football team.

  Yet she still preferred the company of the women in her section. All of them mothers, the features women created an environment that was part coffee klatch, part slumber party, and Margaret, who had never experienced much of either in her life, soaked in this luxuriant, unmistakably female solidarity. They traded magazines back and forth—Martha Stewart Living and Ladies Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens and Southern Living. They shared Web sites about parenting news and Hollywood gossip and horoscopes and ways to fight cellulite. They frequently brought in leftover desserts from their family meals the night before—cherry cobbler, peach cobbler, brownies, and pecan pie—or a surfeit of some backyard crop—cucumbers or tomatoes or peaches or muscadine grapes—and, most frequently, flowers in a vase—black-eyed Susans (June) or paper whites (January) or daffodils (February) or orange-red cannas (July), snipped from an editor’s or writer’s garden that morning. Margaret loved how there was no true dead of winter in Selby, no long dormant period when all smells other than chimney smoke would disappear in a freeze-dried landscape. Though it could briefly dip below freezing just before dawn, once the sun began to warm the ground you could smell again the subtle, green notes of chlorophyll from the cold-hardy live oaks and magnolia trees, ivy and sabal palms and yards of winter-rye grass. Though compact and hard as grape seeds, buds appeared on most trees by Christmas. The green shoots of tulips poked out of the soil by Super Bowl Sunday.

  It was seven o’clock on a Thursday evening, the newsroom eerily empty. Randy had dispatched every available news reporter to cover what the voice on the scanner said was a fire at Massey Hall.

  Once the fifth-oldest Baptist university in the South, the block-long, five-story building had been left to decay since 1971, when the trustees moved the college to Atlanta. Though empty and dark, with windows punched out and graffiti covering the first eight feet of red brick, this was Margaret’s favorite building in town. It reminded her of the original Smithsonian Institute building on the mall in Washington, the one that looked like a castle. Each time she walked by she would notice a new curve or line or angle of the rambling structure, whose turrets sprouted from surprising spots like oaks inadvertently planted by squirrels. It was so different from the rest of the historic structures in towns, most of them shrines to symmetry and order. Though immense, Massey Hall was subtle and challenging. It was not drive-by architecture, and therein lay the roots of its demise.

  A new car dealer in north Selby, Ray Dubose of Dubose Jaguar and Mercedes of Atlanta, Inc., decided that Selby needed a minor league baseball team, and he set about finding land for a stadium. Since all the larger parcels out by his dealership were too pricey, he looked closer in, on the edges of the depressed downtown area, and found two possible candidates. One was the decrepit Massey Hall and the other, at the corner of Second and Hanson Streets, was Mount Pleasant All People’s Baptist Church and World Peace Center.

  Over the last ten years, Dr. Recil Jackson, chief minister and CEO, had doubled the African American church’s membership to just under two thousand parishioners. The redbrick building grew by a room or two nearly every year, giving the sanctuary the look of a large, rambling commercial bakery or candy factory. To counter this, Jackson built a new facade with soaring, white Corinthian columns and a stairway flanked by gold-painted lions lying atop homemade concrete pedestals decorated in a mosaic of broken glass from dishes brought by each family. Across the top of the facade, forty-seven plastic letters spelled out the name of the church, alternating in color from red to white to blue. Random-sized, immaculate, white-painted rocks outlined the entire yard of the church, like lights along a runway, as if to entice and guide spirits in for a perfect landing. And none of this hallowed ground, Dr. Jackson informed Ray Dubose, was up for sale.

  So Dubose sniffed out and courted the blind-trust owners of Massey Hall, a collection of wealthy, north Selby businessmen who owned more than two hundred inner city homes, most of them rat-infested fire traps with leaky roofs that they rented to African-American families at inflated prices. The Reflector broke the story. And that next week, the Middle Georgia Historic Preservation Council, headed by the diminutive, white-haired Pixie Franklin, sued to stop demolition. She was just days from getting Massey Hall officially listed on the National Historic Register. And now this: obvious arson.

  Margaret and Harriet stood at the second-floor window of the newsroom watching the blaze eleven blocks away on Massey Hill, the highest point in Selby. The sun had set, and the fire, which had climbed into every turret like ivy, cast an orange, quivering glow on every surface within a hundred yards.

&n
bsp; The women noticed a long ladder, presumably one end of it connected to a truck, rising up toward the tallest spire of Massey Hall. On the end was a firefighter in a shiny, silver suit that reminded Harriet of a tented turkey in the oven. The extension ladder rose and rose, growing longer and longer, swiveled a little to the right, then rose again, and rose … and rose … and then, at some point near a hundred feet above the ground, it jerkily stopped, creating enough bounce that both women unconsciously held their breath until the fireman let loose with his hose, a stream of water that looked white and crisp as a laser beam.

  Margaret suddenly felt Harriet’s hand on her arm. “That man’s too little to be Dewayne,” she said. “Dewayne’s a big man. I’m sure they’ve got him liftin’ stuff down on the ground someplace.”

  Margaret touched her friend’s hand. “I’m sure you’re right, Harriet. He says he usually works the truck … whatever that means.”

  “I can’t ever remember a fire this big.”

  Margaret could see minuscule, faraway firefighters in reflective yellow suits scurrying about the ground with the energy of mad ants. She thought of Dewayne and his sure but plodding way of navigating the planet. Did he move quicker on the job? Would he be able to dodge a rain of fiery debris? Margaret tried but failed to imagine him in adrenaline mode.

  Harriet opened her purse, reached inside and pulled out a thick crescent moon of a mostly consumed York Peppermint Patty. She unfolded the foil, revealing the dried-out white edge cut by teeth a day earlier, and offered Margaret a piece. After they both finished their bite of candy, Harriet took Margaret’s right hand in hers, bowed her head and closed her eyes.

  “Dear Lord,” she said, “please watch over these brave men tonight …”

  The prayer caught Margaret by surprise, and for a moment she stared at Harriet as she spoke to her creator. Then, like a Sunday school teacher, Harriet peeked at Margaret to see if she had joined in, and Margaret quickly shut her eyes and bowed her head in compliance.