Sweet Jiminy

by Kristin Gore

  He supposed the plot had been amusing enough, but Bud Baxter was such a loser—not remotely the type of character to inspire anyone to spearhead an ambitious new project. Travis overturned his tray in disgust.

  “Now, Mr. Brayer, what are you doing?” the nurse asked as she hustled in to pick up the mess. “If you don’t want any more juice, you can just tell me and I’ll take this away. No need to make a scene.”

  Travis ignored her. He remembered the days when the help had been frightened of him, and he deeply resented the fact that this no longer seemed to be the case. How and when had he lost his authority?

  “Mr. Bobby should be showing up soon,” the nurse said.

  If he took this news well, she might pass over his stack of phone messages, but she needed to determine the degree of his lucidity first. Outbursts could signal movement in either direction.

  “That’s State Senator Brayer to you,” Travis replied shortly.

  He was lucid enough, and prickly as ever. The nurse decided to hang on to his messages a bit longer. He’d never know the difference, after all.

  “Yes, sir, that’s the one,” she answered. “The future governor.”

  She mopped up the spilled juice with a washcloth and took the tray with her on her way out of the room, just as the dogs began barking from the front porch.

  “Dad?” Bobby called soon after from the marble foyer.

  “He’s in his study,” Travis heard the nurse instruct.

  A moment later, Bobby stood before him.

  “Hi, Dad, how ya feeling?” Bobby asked.

  He bent over to shake the old man’s hand. The two of them didn’t kiss or embrace. They never had, and now that Travis was increasingly fragile, his son was grateful for their more formal routine.

  “Like I’m running out of time,” Travis answered with uncharacteristic candor. “I want to get my memoirs done faster than my brain and hands will let me.”

  Bobby nodded and smiled his practiced, understanding state-senator smile.

  “Why don’t you let me get someone to help you?” he offered.

  The people Bobby got to help his father were trained and efficient, and irksomely controlling. Travis had put up with their influx to this point because they were necessary, but he was beginning to feel that enough was enough.

  “This is something I’ve got to do on my own,” he answered firmly.

  Again, Bobby nodded empathetically.

  “I completely understand, Dad. No one but you could do it. But you could have some helpers. You’d still be the one doing all the real work, but instead of having to write everything out, you could dictate. Other people could go through all those boxes of old material and bring the most important stuff to you. Think about it.”

  Travis decided he would. The act of bossing people around had always appealed to him, which his son knew as well as anybody. Plus, it really couldn’t be denied that he’d work at a faster pace with some assistance. But he detected self-interest in his son’s suggestion, and this gave him pause.

  “Maybe I will get some help,” Travis conceded. “Roy and the others have grandkids always looking for summer money—I’ll get some of them to pitch in.”

  As suspected, Bobby Brayer greeted this solution with dismay.

  “They won’t do as good a job as a skilled typist and researcher. I’ll get you someone, Dad. I’ll arrange the whole thing.”

  Travis bet he would. He’d arrange it so that whatever Bobby wanted in or out of Travis’s memoirs would be controlled by this new employee. His son didn’t play straight and fair like a man should. He’d inherited his mother’s gift for manipulation. Travis was on to him.

  “You understand I’m gonna write this book the way I want,” Travis said, taking the stern tone with his son that he’d perfected over forty years.

  “Of course,” Bobby answered. “I’m just trying to help.”

  Travis grunted.

  “Isn’t everyone taking good care of you here?” Bobby pressed.

  Travis grunted again.

  His body was failing him by the day, and he could only hope that his mind wouldn’t follow suit. He’d lost his ability to walk, to relieve himself, even to breathe for long periods of time without a respirator. A small army of caretakers swarmed around him to keep him stretched and fed and alive, and he supposed he was grateful for this. He didn’t allow himself to consider the fact that he was actually dying. He kept thinking of old age as the flu—an illness he’d forgotten to inoculate against, but that he could recover from with enough rest and fluids. He honestly expected to wake up one morning a little bit younger than the day before, the first sign that he was on the road to recovery. Toward this end, he drank his juices and did his exercises and bore the indignities of being changed and washed by strangers. It was all temporary. He’d be on the mend soon enough.

  “How’s the campaign going?” Travis asked.

  Bobby looked out the window, past the orchard to the far-off pastures that rolled down to the river’s edge.

  “We’re ten points down, but gaining,” he answered. “I need to cut another commercial, which is something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Travis nodded expectantly. He’d never been on television before, but he’d always believed he should be. Now it seemed his debut might be imminent.

  “Would it be all right if I shot one here?” Bobby asked.

  As he took a long pause to make it seem like he was considering the request, Travis reflected that it was too bad they couldn’t have filmed this commercial a few years ago, when he might’ve showcased his cattle-wrangling or tree-chopping skills. Travis used to engage in all kinds of manly, athletic activities, before his aging had telescoped his days into their current narrow confines. But he still felt capable of projecting a unique toughness, and he looked forward to the opportunity to impress a larger audience.

  “I think that’d be fine,” he answered.

  “Great, thanks. We’ll stay outside, totally out of your way. You won’t even know we’re here, I promise. It’ll take a full day, but if all goes well, you won’t hear a thing.”

  “You don’t want me in it?” Travis asked incredulously.

  Bobby hadn’t anticipated his father’s hurt.

  “You’re in most of them already,” he replied. “They use those photos of me when I was younger, with you and Mother. You’ve seen them, you look great in them.”

  Old photos, of course. Mug shots of better times, when Travis was revered, and sought after. This was clearly no longer the case. Other people were now firmly in charge, and the pain of this was brutal.

  Rosa Gonzalez had worked a long, exhausting day in the hot Tortillas kitchen, after a sleepless night in which the baby had screamed every hour and a half. As the sun was setting, she finally stopped for a break. She escaped the heat of the kitchen to sit outside in one of her pretty new chairs and watch swallows swoop and swerve in plague-proportion swarms. She marveled at their synchronized, undulating waves and imagined she was at some kind of avian ocean’s edge.

  Two trucks pulled up and broke her reverie. She didn’t recognize them, which was rare. Tortillas catered primarily to the Latino community within Fayeville. It wasn’t often that others wandered in, although Rosa assumed it would just take time to convince the rest of the town to give them a try. She knew her food was good. In America, all you needed was to be good and work hard, and success would follow. This is what she firmly believed.

  Five young men piled out of the trucks, two out of the first, three from the second. They had tattoos and buzz cuts and looked like they hadn’t yet reached their twenties. Rosa briefly wondered if they might be soldiers since she knew that lots of young Fayeville men signed up for the armed forces. But there was an undisciplined air about this particular group that made her reconsider. She didn’t really care who they were or where they came from. If they were hungry, she would feed them.

  Or she’d get Juan to feed them. She wasn’t quite recovered. She
stayed seated, but greeted them with a smile.

  “Hello!” she said brightly. “Welcome to Tortillas!”

  She and Juan had argued about whether to give in to the erroneous local pronunciation of the name or to insist on the correct version. Rosa had advocated assimilation, saying it didn’t really matter and that they’d get more business if they didn’t turn people off by making them think they couldn’t talk right. Juan had insisted they pronounce it the way it was supposed to be pronounced. He assured her people would come around, that they might even enjoy learning a bit of Spanish.

  “Tor-tee-yas?” one of the young men repeated. “What’s that mean?”

  He had a tattoo of a bull with longhorns on his right upper bicep.

  “They’re a little like thin pancakes, made with corn or flour. We make them with corn. You wrap chicken or beef in them. They’re delicious! Come inside and try.”

  Whenever she had to explain what tortillas were to people, she felt secretly sorry for them, like they were sheltered children who’d been deprived of very basic knowledge available to everyone else. And sometimes she found people’s ignorance disingenuous. Who hadn’t heard of a tortilla, in this day and age? Still, she had to stay polite.

  “They’re a little bit like hot dog buns, but for Mexican food,” Rosa continued, determined to connect with these potential new patrons. “Did you know hot dog vendors used to give people gloves to eat their hot dogs with to avoid burned hands? But people kept stealing the gloves, so one hot dog seller asked his friend, who was a baker, if he would bake some kind of edible glove that they could use instead. And his friend came up with the hot dog bun! Interesante, no?”

  Rosa didn’t catch herself in time. She blushed.

  “I mean, that’s interesting, right, guys?”

  The young men were staring at her. They didn’t seem to find it that interesting. Rosa hoped they would just move inside so Juan could handle them. She didn’t want to talk any more.

  “We’re not here for your dirty buns,” the smallest one said.

  The others snickered. The one with the longhorn tattoo high-fived the small one. Rosa kept her mouth closed. She tugged her skirt down to make sure it was reaching to her calf.

  “You feel like you’re sitting pretty, doncha?” the one with the curly blond hair asked her.

  His tattoo was a tractor with angel wings, on a part of his chest she could see because he was wearing a tank top.

  “Everything’s lookin’ pretty good for you from there, ain’t it? You got yourself a regular catbird seat.”

  “What’s a catbird seat?” the one with the longhorn tattoo asked.

  The blond-haired man ignored him, so he turned to the small one.

  “Seriously, what is it?” he asked in a low voice.

  The small guy shook his head in a way meant to convey that his friend was an idiot for asking, as well as suggest that he knew the answer, when he actually didn’t. Rosa was able to discern all of this even as she sat perfectly still in fear, wondering when Juan would come out to check on her.

  “Didja hear me, Mex?” the one with curly blond hair asked.

  Rosa pretended this was a friendly nickname. She didn’t smile, but she looked alert.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said softly.

  “Gittup,” the small guy suddenly bellowed. “Gittup-offa-those.”

  Rosa wasn’t sure what he was saying, he was speaking too quickly and loudly. She understood English perfectly well, but she couldn’t comprehend this kind of quick rage. He took a step toward her.

  “What’s going on?” Juan called from the porch.

  Rosa felt a surge of gratitude. She knew the danger hadn’t passed, but simply having Juan with her made things better. And at least there would be a witness.

  “Those chairs don’t belong to you,” the one with blond hair said to Juan.

  “Rosa, why don’t you come inside,” Juan said quietly.

  Rosa hurried to her feet and skirted around the men. She climbed the porch and touched Juan’s arm as she passed him. Juan was taller than the small one, but he wasn’t a large man. Rosa heard him close the porch door behind her, and she murmured prayers in rapid Spanish as she ran to their baby, tortured by the suspicion that they were utterly on their own.

  Grady was wiping down his counter and thinking about a news show that had informed him that most people’s kitchen sinks were sixty times dirtier than their toilets when the bell on the diner door jingled.

  “Sorry, closed until tomorrow,” he said without looking up.

  “Just wanted to let you know we got the Brayer chairs back.”

  It was Roy’s grandson saying this from the doorway. The curly blond-headed one named Randy who used to shoot spitballs out of straws when he’d come to eat at the Grill. Grady had spent a lot of time cleaning up after him. He’d grown up, but not too much.

  “That so,” Grady answered.

  He stopped wiping and walked outside. The chairs were there all right, in the back of Randy’s truck, standing straight up like they were arranged for a traveling dinner party.

  Grady reprimanded him. “You gotta lay ’em down so they don’t get blown over.”

  He wondered why some people didn’t have more natural sense. He felt it was a generational deficiency. These younger boys weren’t skilled at manual labor and seemed incapable of the simplest tasks. They might be better with computers and cell phones, but they were lesser men. Grady had made his own kids learn how to change tires and locks, how to build and fix. Just basic skills that were dying out, it seemed to him. Grown-up kids these days thought they could hire someone else to handle such things, but they weren’t spending their saved time in any kind of productive, worthwhile way. It was a shame.

  Whether or not Grady realized it, his annoyance actually sprang from the fact that the sight of the chairs in the truck meant they’d been forcibly taken from outside Tortillas, and this upset him. He’d gone along with the plan because it had been the only thing to do, but he’d secretly hoped that it wouldn’t be enacted. He felt guilty for having been the initiating force to begin with, and he’d been hoping that everyone would get distracted by something else for long enough to just forget about the chairs. He recognized the delusional aspect of this thinking, and it only served to aggravate him further.

  Grady watched Roy’s grandson struggle to rearrange the chairs, before stepping in to show him how to do it. A couple of the other boys climbed out of the truck cab to assist.

  So basic. Grady shuddered to contemplate what else they were screwing up. He cleared his throat.

  “Was there any trouble getting these?” he asked.

  Randy grinned in a way that made Grady’s stomach turn.

  “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” he answered.

  Still, Grady hoped it was just big talk. He nodded.

  “Good to hear.”

  Only when the truck was driving away did Grady see Juan standing, stopped in his tracks, staring. How long he’d been there, Grady didn’t know, though it seemed evident by his expression that it had at least been long enough to register that Grady was friendly with the gang of men who’d obviously caused him trouble. Juan’s clothes were dirty and his lip bloodied. Grady’s heart sank.

  “Juan,” he said.

  They’d talked about how “Juan” was Spanish for “John,” which was Grady’s son’s name. Grady had shown him Christmas cards, and the spot on the map where John lived. Juan had mentioned that he had relatives in California, too.

  Juan didn’t respond to Grady. He stood there, holding his hand to his split lip, for another long moment.

  “I didn’t know they were gonna do that, Juan,” Grady said.

  He heard how unconvincing he sounded. He was aware that even he didn’t believe himself. Juan turned and walked away.

  “I’m sorry,” Grady called to his back.

  Back at his sink, later, Grady stared at the sponge in his hand. He imagined he could feel bacter
ia oozing out of it, covering him like flies on a carcass.

  One of Willa’s least favorite chores was a weekly necessity. She didn’t mind collecting the trash from her own home and bagging it all up for disposal. But mixing it in with the refuse of the larger town was another matter altogether. The smell of the dump overwhelmed her, particularly on hot summer days. Since Jiminy arrived, Willa had tasked her with taking the garbage there, feeling only mildly guilty that she was subjecting her granddaughter to the ordeal. She reminded herself that Jiminy was young and hardy. She could take it.

  Jiminy didn’t love the assignment, but she did it without complaint. Standing beside the open trunk of Willa’s car, she tossed three bulging bags of garbage one by one, up and over the Dumpster’s high metal wall. As she listened to the thuds of their landings, she was suddenly struck by how hollow she felt with Bo gone from her life. But she was filling up with other things, she told herself. It was important that she keep moving.

  She turned to slam the trunk shut and felt something brush against her leg. The perpetrator, a gray kitten with two different colored eyes, doubled back for more contact. Jiminy’s grandmother had warned her that people used the dump to dispose of unwanted animals, and Jiminy had previously encountered the pack of feral dogs that roamed the nearby fields. She assumed this kitten had to be a recent arrival based on the fact that it was still alive.

  One of the kitten’s eyes was brown, the other blue. The effect was disconcerting. Looking into its face, Jiminy felt for a second that she was being hypnotized. Later, she decided this might have been the reason she scooped up the kitten and put it in the seat next to her before driving off. She couldn’t account for it otherwise. She knew her grandmother wouldn’t allow her to keep it.

  Before getting back on the main road, Jiminy stopped at a nearby hill, grabbed her backpack, and trekked to the top. The kitten followed her closely, picking its way through the long grass. Under a crabapple tree, Jiminy settled in the shade and looked down toward the river. The kitten climbed into her lap.