“Yes.”
It’s wholly unremarkable, as if I’ve been waiting for him to call out to me for years.
He tucks his hammer into his waistband, pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and wipes the sweat from his eyelashes. He’s wearing a wool cap with flaps down over his ears, and he’s pulled it down over his eyebrows, and I wouldn’t know him at all if it weren’t for the way he’s standing, that sturdy, sure way he used to stand and smoke when he got home from the ice plant. I’ve known, since I received his letter in New York City, that this was a possibility, but when he says, “Nice to see you,” all I can manage is one more quiet yes.
I think Pookie’s some lost without you, he’d written. I’d tell her to go up there and live with you in New York, but she won’t talk to me. Won’t let me see Imagene. He’d written me about prison, told me his number was everything. Just everything. When you got your hair cut, what you got called whenever a body needed to say something to you. My number was 3852. I wrote it at the top of this letter on account of I forgot I had a name, so I threw the page in the fire and started over. He’d told me something he told me he’d never told anyone else, about Mauris’s feet. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell them where they were. It’s just that they was mine and mine alone. She’d danced with me and not them, and she’d rubbed her pretty feet up my legs in the nights when it was cold. I was in love with her feet just like I was in love with her. Wasn’t none of nobody’s business where they was. No apology had come from his words, and no explanation. It was just information: an outrage of ink.
He’s painted the four corner columns of No. 211 fire engine red, but the rest of the house is still its same yellow, neglected and peeling during the six years Sonnyboy has been in Eddyville, so it seems as though the house is bleeding. In the yard, magificently, strut two peacocks. The male thinks me enemy or maybe mate, because he spreads his full complement of feathers, with their hundreds of eyes looking to be seen. He obscures his mate with his display, then struts forward twice and gives the sea of eyes what small breeze penetrates through the cold.
“Where’d you get them?” I ask him.
“From them beatniks up the mountain.”
“You raising them for the eggs?”
“Their eggs are the nastiest things you ever tasted. And they ain’t easy, either. I’m out hand-feeding them before the sun even comes up. Dead snails. Worst smell you ever dreamed up. No, I’m raising them for their companionship.”
The male’s eyes are black peas in his sea blue head, and he’s so fiercely beautiful that I need to apologize just for looking at him. In New York, I’ve seen the genius of tile mosaics laid into the street, the shimmer of a thousand silk blouses. But this bird’s body, the blinding turquoise bleeding down to its purple nethers, is a summit of possibility a million times more brilliant than anything a hand could create. I might fold him into his meat and tuck him into my suitcase, see what August says when the bird pops out in North Carolina with his feathered eyes in the air. See whether Jelly Roll tries to eat him. Elaine Prince, living up by herself on the mountain, complained to the law when a couple of the hippies’ peafowl got loose; they flew over her fence and ate a row of her corn, and she shot one dead. Now, looking at all those eyes, windows to hundreds of truths, I know she’ll go to some special corner of hell for doing it.
“Well. I found a cat, up in New York. All animals are beautiful, aren’t they?”
“People are too, when you look through them,” he says, and I wonder why he doesn’t just climb down from the ladder, so he can stop yelling. “When’d you get home?”
“Yesterday.”
“You seen Pookie yet? I know she’d be right happy to see you.”
“I’m looking for her now.”
“Folks say you’ve been gone a good long while.”
“Just a couple of years.”
“Well, you know a lot can happen in two years. People change.”
“You think Caroline’s changed?”
“She won’t talk to me, so I can’t know it. But you know, it might be that Pookie’s the one what’s grown up. And I know being in the pen doesn’t compare to anything you’ve done, young lady, but let me tell you, sometimes, you think you’ve gone somewhere and been to something and you’ve changed so much down in your soul, but it turns out it’s the folks what stay home and learn to live in their own skins who’s made out in the growing-up department. And in all the five years I was in prison, I never grew up so much as I did in ten days of solitary.”
“Well,” I say.
“And you know Pookie always was a smart one. All smart folks go through some evoluting, I guess. If they didn’t, they’d get awfully bored.”
“Well.”
“Well. You have a nice day. Right nice to see you.” He nods, then goes back to his roofing: 3852, I think, was lucky for him. It finished in fours.
Where Queen meets Fifth, I find Miss Myrtle’s house. Her storm door is skinned, in places, of its paint, and the spring that makes the screen door snap back to has fallen off its hook. I knock three times before Imagene answers. “What” is all she says.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“They ran out of coal this week, so Caroline said it’s too cold to go. She don’t want me catching the pneumonia.”
Two years have grown Imagene taller, melted off her baby’s belly, but she’s still a child. A flock of freckles has come in on the bridge of her nose, and her missing front teeth have grown in crooked: she looks so much like Pookie that it seems a redundancy when I ask whether she’s home.
“Nopey dope.”
“Know where she might be?”
“Hey—ain’t you supposed to be in New York City?”
And then I remember this about her—even when Imagene was an infant, Daddy used to comment on how loud she’d holler in church. “I’m home visiting,” I tell her.
“Bring me anything back?”
“Sorry, Imagene. Maybe next time.”
“Is it true it’s mens up there’d just as soon kill you as look at you?”
“You know where Caroline is?”
“ ’Cause that’s what Grandmama used to say. Said your mama was a damn fool to let you go off like that.”
“You know where Pookie—”
“Said you’d probably come back filled out on dope.”
I zero in on a small, pale freckle on Imagene’s cheek, then lean over and kiss her there. She’s doomed in so many ways, but blessed with boldness. It’s the way of girls nowadays. “Bye, Imagene,” I say. “I’ll see you later.”
“All right,” she says, and ducks behind the storm door, to the magic of an empty house on a school day. “You might find her at the Tin Cup.”
The sun, reduced to a white circle behind clouds, hovers to my right. Nine o’clock or so, meaning I need to find Caroline soon. Over the buckling, frozen mud I run, then, and past the salt thrown in front of houses with spare money. Down the alley and into the cinder-block building. When I walk in the bar, the row of stares again blinds me, and I’m grateful to be in such a hurry as not to let them stop me.
“You seen Caroline Wallace?” I ask the owner.
“Lemme get you a Coke-Cola,” he says. He pulls a bottle from the refrigerator and uncaps it on an opener lodged beneath the bar. “Caroline’s right behind you,” he says, handing me the cold bottle. The stares are still quiet, and I’m afraid to turn around, to let them see how afraid I am to see my best friend.
“I am,” she says. “Over here.” She’s bent over the pool table, taking aim—longer than I remember her, with fingers strong and thin like a woman’s and her hair twisted into a durable but elegant chignon. Her acne has disappeared altogether, and her face is as clear and beautiful as the moon-shaped back of a china plate. She’s grown into her teeth. Gone off and left me in turns.
When she puts the nine ball in the corner pocket, the stares, doubting the import of girls, nod their heads and turn back to their wh
iskeys. Aw shit, says the man playing with Pookie, as he chalks his cue and looks over his possible shots. Ice clinks in glasses. The stares talk and laugh. Peanuts are stirred in bowls.
“Got to dress them horses, you want ’em to make it through a winter like this—”
“Well, the wind died at sunset, so he got stuck out there on that sailboat, the fool—”
“And then she found the boil on my butt—”
“Caroline,” I say. “I’m home.”
She crosses her arms and smiles at me. “You ain’t a bit more home’n the man in the moon,” she says. “You’ll always be a citygirl. Now, forever, and always. What the hell is that on your finger?”
“I got married.”
She sets herself into a fit of insincere laughter, then uncrosses her arms and slaps the pool table, and I have the same sick feeling I had when I told Mother and Grandpap. “Who the Sam Hill hell married you?” she asks. “That guitar player?”
“He’s a bassist.”
“Figures.”
I try to haul myself out of her acidity, the scalding sourness of a girl who once held hands in fresh-cut grass with me, who climbed up on the roof with me just to look at a big red moon. I try to stop the lump in my throat, try to think of the pretty bus ride back to Hickory and beach days to come. But I’ve loved Caroline more than anyone since Daddy, and now I don’t think she’s ever loved me at all. I need a hole to breathe through. I drink from my Coke, but the carbonation’s already gone a little flat. “How’s Gordon?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know. He came back from Fort Lejeune talking ’bout ‘the man’ this and ‘the man’ that, and right about the time I got up enough nerve to ask him what man he was talking about, he went straight on up to Louisville. Sure ain’t took me.”
“Sorry.”
“I ain’t.”
But I can see how two years have made her eyes sadder at their corners. Her man goes back to the table and files his shot, bouncing the ball off the side. “Shit,” he says again. “Your turn.” He hands her the stick. I follow her around the table.
“Who’re you?” I ask him.
“Who am I?” he says, imitating the pitch of my voice, not in a kindly way. He chews on his toothpick, twirling it angrily between his lips. “Who am I?” he asks Caroline, who doesn’t even look at him. “I’m Al Capone,” he says. He walks over and nudges her in the ribs with his elbow.
“Stop,” she snaps. She takes a shot, sinks the six. “This here’s Benton. He come down with Cousin Harrel from Chicago last week, ’cause things is a little hot for him up there. He’s going back come spring and I’m going up there with him.”
“So you two just met?”
“You ain’t the only one can leave town.”
“Never said I was.”
“Who in God’s creation you think you are, anyway? And why are you here hunting me down? What is it you’re trying to find? Poor little country girl ain’t know her ass from a hole in the ground? Some orphan with red hair?” She starts singing, “ ‘I’m going to carry you away from here . . . Carry you away,’ ” and then her eyes start to glisten with the moisture, and she says, “your own life is so boring, you ain’t got nothing better to do’n write a song about somebody else’s?”
“It wasn’t about you.”
She gets close to me, so close I can smell the licorice and worry on her breath. “You. Of all people. Even you. Got to make yourself feel better trying to feel sorry for somebody else.”
“I didn’t even write it.”
“How do you think I felt?” she says. She’s trying to whisper, but she’s so mad, it feels like a scream to me. She’s so angry that when she speaks she bends a little at the waist, and though her arms stay pinned rigidly to her sides, she makes her hands into righteous fists. “Do you ever think about anybody but your damn self?”
“I’m sorry—I really didn’t—I never thought—”
“That’s the thing. You never think. Never have.”
“If you don’t believe me, at least accept my apology.”
“For what? So you can feel good enough about it to write more songs about me?”
“Never mind,” I say, backing up. “Whyn’t you spend the rest of your life trying to pretend you ain’t special to nobody. I don’t care anymore.”
“Ha!” she laughs, a short blast like the sound of a trumpet, and she’s right—I’ll care forever. “Ain’t none of us country girls never going to mean a bit of nothing to nobody. We wasn’t raised to. Sooner or later,” she yells, “you’re going to figure things out.”
I drop my Coke right at her feet, and as it shatters my body moves, and I don’t know whether I’m trying to hug her or slap her, but when I reach for the pool cue she moves it, leaving me to stumble forward against the table. Capone laughs.
“Little bit done flew off the handle,” says one of the stares.
“Ladies. Ladies,” says the owner. He runs over and starts picking up shards of glass. On the floor all around him, soda bubbles wink in the dingy light.
I wheel around again, run past the stares and push out the door into the bright light, clean winter. Down Queen Street and back to Grandpap’s house. One: Put his boots back. Two: Pack things I’m likely to forget. Toothbrush. Hair grease. Three: Pack things I’m likely to remember. Sunday skirt. Eyeglasses. Four: Four. Four loses itself in the lack all around me, the emptiness of people who refuse to love. But then I remember: Get a jar of Grandpap’s pickled tomatoes for the ride back, because Negroes are not allowed in the bus depots. In a day I’ll be in Hickory, boarding the band bus to Winston-Salem, to the ballrooms that feed us and the crowds who rattle the floor with their love. I’ll be back in a nice feathered bed beside my husband. Back in North Carolina, trying for something I’ve never known. In my new life, which Caroline cannot touch.
LIGHTNING
Days on a beach are days of small deaths: the quiet balls itself into a punch, and the chill air sharpens mornings that march toward nothing. Jelly Roll naps for the most part, resting up for a long night of pretending to hunt. Boredom builds barriers of dread across the mind’s peace, and the rolling carpet of water carries itself off to no visible end. The Outer Banks is not for those who haven’t yet squared reality with infinity. I excuse myself. I couldn’t have known.
For August, who has always lived in the city, Ocracoke is an escape, a cleansing. When we first arrived, he sat each morning burying his toes, wondering like a child at the orange sea glass and the crab skeletons strangled in seaweed. Nights, he made me go out with him to watch the lonely beacon of the lighthouse, to listen to the boats bringing their whistles of mourning from the mainland. But after two weeks here, even he’s beginning to see past the magic, straight through to the endless non-ending. Outside of the dances, he no longer plays his bass. He won’t even let it out of its case, and complains that the humidity is wrecking its varnish. We make love sometimes at dawn; mornings, I cry. Thinking about how I’ve embarrassed poor Caroline, I tell him, and he makes the most awful face before leaving me in bed alone. He reads the News-Record and fights with me over what it tells him, calls me country and a clod, says my entire reading life has been wasted on fantasy, wonders aloud how he ended up marrying so far beneath himself. Then, as though being in the same room with me will reduce his IQ, he goes to stand on the back porch of our boardinghouse. As though staring at squirrels should be more engaging than speaking to his wife. He hums to himself, looks for loose feathers to give to Jelly Roll, peels bark off a tree trunk. From the window I watch, appraise: his work is beginning to reveal itself up one of the lower branches. If we stay here long enough, he might undress the whole tree.
I believe our landlady notices, but she’d die before she said anything to her dear, bad August, for whom she has the incurable sweets. She giggles at everything he says—even if he pronounced the grass green, she’d laugh. Her name is Janet Silvers, and she looks to be twice my age, and I cannot say for sure that she’s never married, but the
photographs on her mantel are of people long dead, people of bonnets and monocles and unpressed hair. Besides her house and two others, she owns a restaurant in town, a fish fry. She’s always working, then—boiling beans in the morning, or sweeping gutters between the lunch rush and the dinner crowd, or mopping the dining hall after she closes. All of which gives her little time to blink her long lashes and swish her fat ass at August, but when she gets home she does that anyway, with the energy of an athlete. Some nights she plays the piano, and August and I spread out on the sofa and listen out of politeness. The missed flats, the chords sounded out note by note, her keyless voice: she struggles with every measure, stopping midphrase with her fingers glued to the wrong keys, her mouth hanging open in slow confusion, and I think that only someone who hated the piano could insult it so.
When she’s at work I play her piano naked, while the gnarled, knotted wooden stooltop imprints itself on my ass. If it’s a warm day, I’ll open her parlor windows—neighbors be damned—and let the wind wake my skin: August will hear me and get out of bed, unable to resist the invitation. It’ll be before the morning paper from Wilmington, before editorials on foreign policy and news of the nation’s banks have raised August his few rungs above me. He’ll roll the piano’s top down to my fingers, take me back to his bed: mouth me, mold me, love me. After, in that odd space between love strong enough to put tears in my eyes and the separating business of the morning, we listen to the birds. Seabirds, forest birds, Northern birds on their winter holidays, more birds than either of us has ever heard in a lifetime. Even in the night, they party on, these birds, and in the morning, they still rise before dawn.
August’s mother calls him daily, sometimes twice in one day—she never called when he was in New York, but she’s assailed by loneliness now that her bird has left the nest. “Wow,” he’ll say, after he hangs up Janet’s receiver, because his mother has asked if she might mail him some socks, or deposit money into his Chemical Corn account. Once I heard him tell her, “I’m a married man now. My wife is responsible for that sort of thing.” She hung up on him then, I suppose, because he shouted, “Hello? Hello?” into the mouthpiece before he replaced the receiver. “If my brother had lived,” he told me, “my mother would have somewhere else to spread her neuroses.” He won’t say whether she’s yet congratulated him on our marriage.
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