When the storm starts to hit hot, we stop on that little one-lane bridge what runs over Collum’s Creek. We set there so long, listening to his radio, and I think for sure he’s wanting some little piece a sugar and just don’t know how to ask on account of he never talks much. But when I lean over and pretend to fiddle with his turn signal, he don’t kiss me nor nothing. Just sets there tapping his foot to Ray Charles, and so I relax and settle back into my seat and watch the water roiling over rocks on its way to rise up the bank. Feels like that water’s calling something out to me. Not nothing like “come in, come in,” but more like “stay dry—things is finally about to change for you.”
Gordon’s worked at that distillery for long about six year, ever since he quit high school, and when the storm lets up and the rain turns to little pecks, he starts on back driving to show me what the distillery looks like. Turns out there’s big fire, taking it all down, and we can see the smoke for miles on our way up the road. The car windows is cracked just a hair, and you can smell the bourbon on that smoke like you was pouring it over a steak. When we get to the top of Blanton Hill he gets out the car and throws his nice canvas jacket down on the wet grass so I can set on it, then he sets down next to me, on one of his coatsleeves, and I look at them smoking clouds opening up into the sky like gray seashells. “Wow,” I say, but he don’t answer.
It’s fire engines showing up from all over everwhere, even one with NICHOLASVILLE painted on the side of it, and all their bells are clanging and all their firemen are just a yelling, but that fire’s just going to keep on going and going—you can tell it just from looking. All the bourbon what’s running in little rivers around the warehouse done caught fire too, and from way up on top of this hill, we can see how all them little flaming rivers connect like they was a map of Louisiana.
“What you think started it?” I ask Gordon.
“Lightning?”
“Probably. You’re probably right.”
Then he starts talking about all the bourbon what’s burning out that warehouse. About a million gallons, he says. Enough bourbon to fill a small pond. He’s telling me how part of his job is to stack the barrels on top of each other in ricks, and how even with the barrels stacked, air gets in through the wood and then the bourbon evaporates out the wood and into the air. “The angels’ share,” he says it’s called.
“What kind of a fool misbehaving angel drinks bourbon?” I ask him, but he don’t laugh. He was only a couple of years ahead of me in school but he always has been more grown up than anybody else.
“You got to keep the air wet,” he says now, “keep it dark and cool.” And then the way he starts talking about that warehouse, and how the company’s always dreaming up ways to increase the production, you’d think he was Jim Beam hisself.
“So what you going to do now?” I ask him, when the roof of the warehouse crashes in and sets all them firemen to shouting. So high up on that hill, I can’t make out anything they’re saying, but I can tell it ain’t good. “Looks like you won’t be going to work for a while.”
“This won’t kill the business. Just set it back. People got to drink. People always got to drink. There’ll be some cleanup days. And if they don’t need everbody for it, I reckon I might just get myself out of town.” He says it calm as anything. “I got money saved up. I want to see places. Maybe even go out to Oklahoma and sit in at a drug store counter.”
I rock on my butt and throw my hair back, so he can tell I’m just as fancy as he is. “Well,” I say. “I don’t feature on going out West to get my head beat in just so I can sip out of some White man’s teacup. Me, I’m going to New York come the new year. To stay with Audrey Martin.” It’s a lie, naturally, but once it’s out there hanging around in the air, it sounds pretty reasonable. “I got almost enough for the train ticket,” I tell him. And that part ain’t a lie, not exactly—I know how much the ticket costs, on account of Audrey’s written it home to me near about twenty times. What’s more, I’ve made double that off S. B. Fuller so far.
“You’ll need more than train fare, you know. Stuff costs a lot in New York. Food. Taxis. Shows.”
“Well, and that’s where you might come in. You want to come to a party?”
Now, I know what the Fuller Cosmetics manual says about putting differences aside for the sake of enterprise, but after that Second Baptist party and some pretty tiresome door-to-door, I reckoned I was through with women and their cattiness for a while. I took my money up to Lexington, to the man in that office, who had on the same checked suit he had on the day we met. By then, I had ninety-six dollars and a mostly empty cosmetics case, and the man told me he was awful surprised on account of it’d only been two weeks. “Honest and eager,” I reminded him, and then he filled my case back up, gave me half my money back for commission, and showed me the new product line. “Sir Fuller,” he said. “Makeup for the discriminating man.” I knew wasn’t nobody in all of Mt. Sterling what could even pronounce the word “discriminating,” but when I saw them male makeup pens, I saw money. “Very modern. Very 1960,” the man in the checked suit said. He made it sound like a right fine notion.
“I’ma throw a party down to the Tin Cup,” I tell Gordon now. “And I want you to spread the word.”
“What kind of party?”
“Sir Fuller. Male makeup.”
Gordon smiles. First one I seen him crack all day. “You sure are enterprising,” he says, and then I smile too, because I’m pretty sure he’s the one person in town who’ll get it.
“For the discriminating man,” I say, winking at him.
We set up on that hill a little longer, even after the bourbon starts to get in our lungs thick like we was drowning in it, and the air gets chill. We watch them firemen still yelling and the little bourbon rivers burning, and Gordon don’t crack not one word, which I like on account of in Grandmama’s house there ain’t never one solid ounce of peace and quiet. Then finally, when I think he done forgot I’m even setting there, Gordon says, “I know you come from a hardworking family.” Ain’t nobody had the nerve to mention who I come from in years, but then he gets even better, saying, “I know your father was on for a good piece a time down to the ice plant. And I know your mama used to seamstress. I remember watching her walk down the street all pressed and pretty, and I used to wish one day I’d marry a lady like her.” He undoes his hand from mine and rubs me on the knob of my shoulder. “And now here you are, taking care of your sister and your grandmama and conducting sales business just like a man.”
It hits me for a second that maybe Gordon Bell ain’t such good people, on account of it sounds like when he does find a fine, upstanding lady like my mama, he’s going to take her and strap her in behind a plow. But anyway, he can be a body at a party. “This Saturday the thirtieth,” I tell him, getting up from his coat. “Two in the afternoon.”
I’ve already asked the owner of the Tin Cup, who says it sounds like a right fine idea, so I spend Thursday and Friday rounding up some more men. For starters, I invite anybody who’s ever seen me naked. Even Junebug and Ralph Cundiff I invite, on account of I reckon what the manual says about pettiness and enterprise counts for men too. Then I invite Deacon Ragland, who always calls me “young sugar” when we’re screwing around.
“Young sugar,” he says when I tell him about the party, “I’ma need a little something to make me enter a house of ill repute.”
I think about what Gordon said to me, about me being better’n that, and I give Deacon Ragland one little prudy kiss on the cheek. When he sees I ain’t going to do more’n that, he grabs me and holds me close to his body, so close I can feel his big barrel stomach fill with air and let out again, but I just push myself away. “That kiss is just the start. I’ma need you to buy some cosmetics ’fore I lay anything else on you.”
We both laugh, but only one of us is serious about the joke, and I run out his back door just dying to breathe the fresh air.
I invite Melton and Tyrone Boyd, and when Melt
on laughs at the idea of men wearing makeup, I tell him it’s the new thing and he better jump on the wagon. “Don’t let being old-fashioned get in the way of a clear complexion.”
I stop at ten men, since that’s really all the makeup pens I have. Come Saturday at one o’clock I get busy organizing my mirrors and gathering all the clean white cloths in Grandmama’s closet. I put the cloths in a bowl of water and push them to the back of the icebox—it’s key, the Sir Fuller insert says, to close the male pores before application, and anyway I figure in all this hot weather, putting a cold cloth on somebody’s face is as good of a business strategy as any other. Grandmama’s laying on the couch asleep, where she’s been for days, and before I leave out the house I take a spoonful of morphine and put it on her tongue. She barely wakes up, so I raise her head up to make sure she don’t choke on it, and then I kiss her, and I’m so glad I decided to linger that day I kissed her in the doctor’s office, on account of she already don’t smell like my grandmama no more with all that morphine running through her.
“Afternoon, Grandmama. Have a good sleep.”
It’s a right pretty day, one of them afternoons when air blows dry from the mountain, and I’m almost skipping down the street, I’m so excited about making some money. Thursday night, I went over to where Gordon Bell stays, over on Seventh Street, in that house Miss Ora Ray lived in before she died. Colette Smith was over on the porch next door visiting kinfolk, and when she saw me coming up the street she got this satisfied look on her face. But after what she told me down to Second Baptist, I ain’t felt shamed about Junebug being with her no more, and ain’t felt like I was standing any lower in life than she was. I figure in order to feel bad that some man left you, you got to first off feel like you ain’t pretty enough and fun enough for him to’ve loved you. More and more, I’m figuring out how just about ever girl I know is fun enough and pretty enough, and most of the times when people get together it’s all a big accident, and nothing to feel bad or good about. With Junebug and Colette, it was a specially big accident.
“What a nice surprise,” Gordon said, when he opened the door, and I was right happy, on account of he said it loud enough that I knew Colette heard it. When he let me in the door I heard her baby let out a little holler, like she done got so mad she had to resettle him in her lap.
“Land sakes alive,” I said, when I get in the house, ’cause Gordon done moved everthing out what was in it when Miss Ora Ray was alive. I was there a few times back then, back when Audrey’s mama used to take care of Miss Ora Ray and we’d come over and listen to the lady’s radio while Danaitha was giving her a bath. But now everthing’s different. Gordon done took all them little dime-store paintings off the wall and put a giant clock in every room. He showed me the bedroom, and I saw how he done took it upon hisself to paint the walls orangy-red. “I think the desert’s like this,” he said, when I asked him why.
He showed me ever single room, even the bathroom, and I let on like I wasn’t imagining Miss Ora Ray’s ghost setting up in the tub, her arms stretched out to Danaitha and her mouth twisted up in something she couldn’t ask, and then he took me back to the living room and I saw that he done got hisself a telephone.
“Mind if I use it?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
“It’s a long-distance call,” I said, but he shrugged, and he scooted a chair up to the telephone stand for me before he went to set hisself down on the couch. There I was thinking no man ever been that nice to me before, and maybe there was something wrong with Gordon Bell, like he had a fatal disease, or a spaceship full of aliens hiding out in his backyard.
I picked up the receiver and dialed up the party line but I ain’t even took my finger out the wheel before somebody else’s voice come on. It was Mrs. Barnett, and I caught her in the middle of a sentence, talking about how Reverend Graves done sneaked some prophylactics under his order down to the store. I was aiming to hear the rest of it, or at least find out who she was telling it to, but there was Gordon Bell looking right at me and I knew it wasn’t polite to listen in on the party line so I hung up. “What you know,” I told him. “Everbody wants to talk tonight.”
I went over to the couch to set next to him, but he scooted over until he was sitting right to the end of his own couch, like he was scared of me. He nodded his head and smiled, then looked down to his knees, and I wondered more about what might be wrong with him, like maybe he had a tail what came out at twelve o’clock midnight. “They started rebuilding the distillery yet?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
I wanted to tell him it was like a radio show, and one-word answers weren’t going to get him nowhere, but it seemed like he didn’t really care too much about making any moves. He was just looking at his knees—seemed like he might even be the type what enjoyed looking at his knees. Seemed like he was entertained just by the sound of me breathing. Seemed like he was living a lot of his life in his head. Seemed like really, he’d make a good boyfriend for Audrey Martin.
“All right, well, can I try your phone again?”
“Be my guest,” he said, and he threw out his hand to the phone.
I put my finger on the wheel and rung up a zero, and it took the wheel a few seconds to spin back around and then there was the operator on the phone, saying, “What number, please?” and I gave it to her, all them ten long numbers they got in the big cities nowadays, and by the time I got to the fifth number my voice was shaking, and I wanted to say it was on account of I ain’t never actually spent money to talk to a person, but the bigger truth is that I was afraid to talk to Audrey Martin. She’s a legend in this town now, for one thing, but for another she done lived in that big city and changed so much, I was afraid that when she answered that phone and heard my voice, which still ain’t proper, and she heard my mind, what still ain’t as big as hers on account of ain’t nothing happened to me in the year she’s been gone, that well of feeling she been writing all them letters from was just going to dry up. I reckoned if she talked to me again she’d see that we wasn’t never meant to be friends, not really, and then it’d just be me there in Mt. Sterling with my dying grandmama and my baby sister who still wasn’t even tall enough to stand on a stepstool and fry corn bread. Me with my dreams what can’t never seem to come true, me with this man who was too bashful to look up from his knees.
Before I could even think everthing I needed to think about all of it, there Audrey was, telling me “Good evening,” and them Frenches was right—she’d grown into a right proper way of talking.
“How do.”
“Pookie?”
Ain’t nobody called me that in so long, and I was right surprised on how good it felt. “Audrey.”
She asked how I was, and she asked after my family, and then she said, “Tell me everything,” but I really didn’t have much to tell, and the stuff I would tell I wasn’t going to tell in front of Gordon, so I made up some stuff about the Wild West show that came through town even though I didn’t have the money to go to it and last Sunday’s church service, which I did go to but ain’t paid as much attention to as I made it sound like. “So you’re coming down here?” I asked her, when I was finished with all that, and then finally Gordon had the good sense to get up out of the living room and pretend like he had something to do in the kitchen.
“Of course I am,” she said. “I’d never break a promise to you.”
“You know it’s New Year’s Eve?”
“Sure I do.”
“Ain’t that a big party time in New York City?”
She stopped for a minute. “Well, you know the Negroes in Harlem don’t really go to Times Square. And big party times have never been all that important to me.”
“Well, all right then. Seven o’clock sharp. I don’t know if Mrs. Raspberry told you that.”
“It’s in the contract. I sent it back to her.” She laughed. “You make a good manager.”
“Well okay then. All right.”
“Caroline?”
“You think you might come up here some day? I mean, you’ll come visit, of course, but do you think you might come up here to live?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “What’s so special about New York, anyway?”
“Oh, Pookie. You’ve got to come see it. The people here are just unreal. They’re not like anyone you or I have ever known. They don’t care what anybody thinks—they just do things. There are people standing in the park playing flute. A man in the subway who dances with a doll. You just wouldn’t even believe it all.”
I laughed like I was interested, but it was phony and she probably knew it. “I remember when you was running to town, out of breath crying ’cause your mama done slapped you. Now look at you, in New York, trying to tell me what’s real and what ain’t. Well, I just don’t see why I ought to drag myself up there to see some man dancing in a subway. I ain’t lost a damn thing in New York.”
She got all quiet, and she finally whispered “Caroline” real quiet, like maybe she was crying when she said it. It sounded like Gordon was frying bacon, and then it got to smelling like he was, and the thick aroma of it reminded me that he was probably halfway listening, and he did seem like a quiet type but who knew who he knew. And then there were those ten minutes on his phone costing more than I made in a day’s worth of hog killing, and I didn’t want to take advantage of him even if he did seem like some slug who wouldn’t mind.
“Well, I got to go then,” I said.
“I can’t wait to see you.”
“Same here,” I told her, and we said our goodbyes.
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