Killer Diller

by Edgerton, Clyde

  Wesley pulls his heel up onto the bench and grasps his knee with his arms. “Do you know what a concubine is?” he asks.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, David had one.”

  “Most kings in the Old Testament did.”

  “Are you . . . did you join the church in Michigan?”

  “Yes. When I was twelve. Methodist.”

  “Did they call it ‘getting saved’?”

  “I think some did and some didn’t. But we changed to Baptist after my mother died. Father likes the Baptists. It’s a good thing he does because he’s trying for a job at Ballard.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. But don’t that strike you as funny?” says Wesley. “About the concubines and all.”

  “Why?” Phoebe reaches into her bag and gets three pieces of popcorn. Three pieces is not a handful. She’s trying not to gobble a handful at a time. She’s about to starve. She’s supposed to eat in small amounts and chew well—one night last week the president of Ballard University gave a talk called “Chewing for Health Means Healthy for Jesus.”

  “It didn’t seem to bother nobody then, but it would now,” said Wesley. “I mean the kings won’t married to all them girls.”

  “That was the custom.”

  “Custom? Well, somebody needs to preach about customs. Why don’t somebody preach a sermon about customs, about how that was okay then, okay with God, because whoever wrote about it in the Bible didn’t mind about all that going on—and they were getting it straight from God and they didn’t write down anything about God not liking it. But you let somebody set up a concubine today and Sears and them would go crazy. But it don’t look like God would say anything—now— because he didn’t then.”

  Wesley reaches for some popcorn in Phoebe’s bag. Phoebe draws back, catches herself, offers the bag.

  “Sears and them might could go straight to somewhere in the Bible,” says Wesley, “and show what a sin it is. I can show what a sin it won’t.” Wesley takes popcorn into his mouth from his flat palm. “Or maybe they’re saying God changes with the times. Do you think that’s it? They’re not saying that, are they? Maybe I ought to figure out how to preach about it myself.”

  Phoebe has never known a boy who got excited about religion. Randy, fishing. Pete, army things. Maybe he’ll suggest we park somewhere tonight, Phoebe thinks. He’s good looking, good looking in an interesting and intriguing way, and his feeling for me seems genuine. More and more people will be appreciating me as I get smaller. I’m down eleven already. Eleven! All I have to do is lose that much about nine more times. I won’t know myself. And here’s a man, Wesley, intriguing and rather mysterious, who seems to love me like I am, right now. While I’m in North Carolina there is no reason I can’t spend some time with him, perhaps even become slightly intimate with him. Maybe he’ll suggest we drive somewhere. I need somebody to touch me. It would feel so good, just some soft touching.

  Wesley is watching the kittens in the pet shop window. He feels Phoebe’s hand slide over his. His eyes widen. He wets his lips. Oh, man. Oh, man. This is a sign. Everything is going just right. He feels salt on her fingertips. She wants some loving. He needs to say something that’s about sex and at the same time not about sex, and then they need to ride out to Lake Blanca to look at the moonlight. He’s got to think how to set things up.

  “Have you read Solomon?” he asks.

  “Maybe a verse or two.” That piece of popcorn looks like a man with a long beard, she thinks. It looks like God.

  “I had this operation one time.”

  “Operation?” She puts the piece of popcorn in her mouth.

  “On my, ah, thing.” I need to get back to Solomon. This is not exactly right. But if I just say ‘thing’ it’ll be all right. We can talk about it. Maybe she’ll talk about it. Who knows?

  “‘Thing’?”

  “You know, my thing.”

  “Wesley!” Her fingers, holding another piece of popcorn, stop in front of her mouth. She stares at him.

  “It was so big it was causing my shoulders to slump.”

  “Wesley!”

  “They had to trim it down.”

  Phoebe looks away and then back at this boy who is suddenly talking so wild.

  Wesley hesitates. She seems a little bit alarmed or something. “No, I’m, I’m kidding. Phoebe. Okay? Okay, Phoebe? I really did have a problem in there though. When I was little. A little boy, I mean. And they had to look in there.”

  “Look in there? Wesley . . .” Phoebe is frowning, shaking her head back and forth.

  “I was about ten. It hurt so bad they had to give me a towel to chew on. I think it’s when I started snapping my fingers when I hurt.”

  “Snapping your fingers?”

  “Instead of hollering when I hurt, I just kind of moan and start snapping my fingers. I got that habit somewhere, and I think it was then, when they gave me a towel to chew on.”

  Phoebe sees a little boy, pain in his eyes. “Oh, Wesley. That sounds horrible. What caused it?” She realizes she shouldn’t have asked. This is very odd. She shouldn’t have asked. He’ll be encouraged.

  Wesley is encouraged. “I don’t know. It all started at the orphanage. They had this swimming pool and I was in the shallow end one day. I was about six.” Wesley doesn’t remember telling this to anybody before. “And I tried to pee and I could feel it just plain stop, about halfway out. So I went up to Terrone, who was taking care of us—this black guy—and told him and he says, ‘You just need a commode.’ So I went inside and tried the commode, but it was the same thing. I was just plain stopped up. So I went back outside and told him and he went inside with me and stood there and watched while I tried to pee. Not a drop. Nothing.”

  Wesley is sure he’s never told this before. He’s going too far. This is private stuff. But he can tell that Phoebe is interested— she’s watching him, her blue eyes wide.

  “‘I got to go real bad,’ I told him. I could tell he was scared. He drove me to the hospital in the bus. There weren’t no cars. I was starting to hurt—I had to go so bad.

  “We got there and the doctor came in, pulled my pants down, and there was this nurse in there too. They put me on a table on my back. He went over and washed his hands two or three times and came back with this little pan of water, or I guess maybe it was alcohol, and in there was this thing that looked like a wire.” Stop here, Wesley tells himself. She’s looking funny.

  This is certainly not about religion, thinks Phoebe. What’s going on here? Do people down here tell these sad little stories about their . . . their members?

  “He took that and he took my, my pisser in his cold hand” —Wesley crosses his legs— “and stuck that wire in the end and it scared me and I started crying again and he went all the way down in there with it, then he pulled that out and stuck a little tube in there—”

  “Wesley!” Phoebe slides away on the bench a few inches.

  “—and once he got that all the way in—”

  “Oh, goodness, Wesley!” She looks away and then back at him. “I don’t think I should hear any more. I’m sorry.”

  “—he. Well, anyway. Then every one or two months—”

  “Wesley, please.” This is so strange.

  “Okay. Okay. That’s all.” Maybe he can finish telling her some other time. Or maybe that’s it on that subject. Closed. Over. Done with. He feels a little bit lonely. He ought to move along to something else sort of on the same subject. “But it’s never affected my, ah, you know, sex life so to speak. Everything’s in order, except nothing’s been used really since I joined the church. You know what I mean. But I’ve been trying to figure out if that’s the way God wants it to stay. I mean, like what we were talking about. I am a Christian. And I’ve stopped everything like cussing and stuff—even got my roommate to stop, pretty much. But you know, people had sex in the Bible when they won’t married and it didn’t seem like no big deal.”

 
“But it’s one of God’s laws.” Phoebe’s hand stops in the popcorn bag. He’s very odd, she thinks. I wonder if he’s just interested in sex things, and operations, and for sure my breasts, and nothing else. I wonder if he’s one of those. Something is getting dangerous. Phoebe thinks of some of those crime shows she’s seen on television, pictures of a woman’s partly nude body. “I’m a little tired,” says Phoebe. “I think I’d better get back to the Nutrition House.”

  Tired! Get back! thinks Wesley. Oh NO.

  This could be a horrible danger, thinks Phoebe. He is in a halfway house. A halfway house. Why has it taken so long for the red flag to go up? There is something rather ‘smooth’ about him.

  “Okay,” says Wesley. “If you think so.” What did I do wrong? Why can’t you just tell women things. You can’t do nothing right with women. Oh, well. Maybe she is tired. She’s got a lot of weight to carry around. “Want to get a little supper somewhere?”

  “No, I’d better get back, thanks. I’m sorry. I just need to get back now. I have some things I need to do.”

  In the Nutrition House parking lot, Wesley looks across the car roof at Phoebe as she gets out. She won’t look at him. Should he follow her in or what? Go on back to BOTA House now? See if she’ll sit on the porch for a while? Where can he go now? It’s not even dark, not even suppertime. He was hoping to have her at the lake soon after sundown, getting her hot and bothered while he got hot and bothered. Sort of like old David.

  Wesley follows about two steps behind Phoebe to the back door of the Nutrition House. He’s trying to think of something to say. “I’ll see you later,” he says. “I’m supposed to get on over to see this boy I’m going to be teaching bricklaying to, anyway. Retarded boy.”

  “Oh, okay.” More strange stuff, thinks Phoebe. “Good night, Wesley. I, I enjoyed it.”

  You sure got a unusual way of showing it. “Yeah, me too.”

  As he walks along the sidewalk, taking extra long strides, he thinks hard about what he can say to Phoebe the next time. Something to get things rolling again, to get things changed back around so they can get on out to Lake Blanca. Get some loving going. He thought for sure all the Bible stuff would work, but it didn’t somehow. I shouldn’t have said a word about my pisser. Why did I get off on all that? I should have talked about movies or Mrs. Rigsbee or something.

  Dear God, guide me to do Thy will. Direct my thoughts in ways pleasing to Thee. Help me to know what to say. Wesley tries to sense God up there through the trees passing over his head, way up there somewhere in the dark blue and yellow sky where some stars are already appearing. He buttons his denim jacket.

  But what about David and them? I’m probably going to end up acting more like David and them than like Jesus. I don’t see how I can help it. I can’t expect to be like Jesus. He was perfect.

  Wesley decides to walk on over to the Sunrise Garage where that Vernon boy and his daddy live. As he walks by the Ballard campus, he thinks about going to the library to look up “love” and see what he can find that might help out.

  The sidewalk changes to a dirt path. Wesley comes to a small sign nailed to a post: “Sunrise Auto Repair Shop,” with a rising sun painted on it. An arrow points down a dirt street. They said there would be signs. In a few hundred yards, he sees a bright light at the top of another, larger sign. Just beyond the sign is a tree stump, then a car engine on the ground, then the garage. Cars are parked around. A light is on inside the garage. A light burns on the front porch of the little house next door. That must be where they live, Wesley thinks. They said it was just the two of them. Living there inside four walls. No long halls with boys and boys and boys.

  Somebody is working in the garage—Vernon’s daddy, probably. As he gets closer Wesley hears some blues music—bottleneck guitar, maybe Dobro—coming from inside the garage. The garage is just big enough to hold an old orange GMC school bus. The top of the bus almost touches two long sets of fluorescent bulbs shining from the ceiling.

  Wesley stops at the garage entrance, leans against the door jamb, looks around. The floor is packed black dirt. He remembers his old habit of looking at windows and back doors to see how they were locked. He lets himself look for a back door, doesn’t see one. Two windows, one locked, one he can’t tell. No nails. He could pop a pane. Too easy. Mr. Jackson is standing on a chair, bending over the bus fender and looking down on the engine. Wesley starts toward him.

  “Howdy.”

  Holister Jackson looks up, steps down off the chair, grabs a rag and wipes his hands. He has a big plug of tobacco in his cheek. He spits into a dirt-filled bucket near his foot. “Hey. ‘Wesley,’ is that right?”

  “That’s right. I like that music you got on there.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  Wesley walks on over, wondering if Mr. Jackson is going to offer his hand. He doesn’t.

  Mr. Jackson drops the rag onto the fender. “That’s about all I listen to. Blues. I play a little country for variety, listen to the radio once in a while.”

  “That’s a tape?”

  “Yeah. Son House.”

  “I got a poster of him,” says Wesley. “I’m learning to play bottleneck myself. I’m going to buy a National Steel Dobro when I save up enough money.”

  Holister grabs his rag, wipes away a grease spot on the fender, then spits. He looks at Wesley. “I got one of them.”

  “You got a National Steel?”

  “Yeah, I got two or three guitars and things I traded for car work. The National Steel is back there in the corner.”

  “Damn—I mean namn.” Wesley steps over engine parts, a stool, heading for the back corner, looking, staring, seeking the outline of a National Steel.

  “It’s behind that oil barrel, under them rods, in that yellow shammy bag. It ain’t been played in ten, twelve years and the strings are off it. Did you say ‘namn’?”

  “I just put n’s on the front of cuss words. A habit, kind of.” There. Wesley sees the bag. It’s deep in the corner. “Can I . . .?”

  “Yeah. Get it out. Just be careful.”

  Wesley grips the Dobro neck through the bag.

  “Be careful with it. It’s the real thing.”

  Wesley lifts it. “This is yours? A National Steel?”

  “This guy traded it to me for some car work—a guy from Alaska. Hand it here.”

  Outside there is a noise coming—somebody making a sound like a car. Vernon. He comes running into the garage. “Eeerk.” He stops right up close to them, opens his car door, gets out, stares at Wesley, and sticks out his hand. “Oh, it’s Mr. Killer Diller.” Vernon’s wire-rimmed glasses, smudged with fingerprints, reflect fluorescent lights.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” says Wesley. “How you doing?”

  “Tolerable.”

  Holister has laid the Dobro on a table, and is pulling it out of the yellow shammy bag. There are no strings and no strap on it. The chrome body has no shine, no luster.

  “Can you play that thing?” Vernon asks Wesley.

  “Not like it is.” A golden, precious idea suddenly blooms in Wesley’s head. “What if I shine it up? Put some strings on it, maybe practice on it a little bit, give it a little use?” Wesley stops breathing. The entire weight of the universe is waiting to collapse onto a “no,” to lift and fly with a “yes.”

  Holister spits, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks hard at Wesley. “I guess so. It ain’t doing nothing back there in the corner. Just be careful with it.”

  Wesley raises both hands over his head, clenches his fists. Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth proclaim the sound. “I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get the strings and . . .” Wesley touches the guitar—picks up a rag, rubs out a little circle, which shines.

  Vernon looks at Holister. “There ain’t no food in there except them tomatoes.”

  “And a strap,” says Wesley. “I already got some bottleneck teaching books. I’ve been—”

  “How about in the freezer?” sa
ys Holister.

  “Nothing in there except that froze fish. I don’t want no fish.”

  “Go get something then.” Holister reaches in his pocket, pulls out a wad of bills, separates a ten and several ones. “Get some of that ham and a loaf of bread and some other stuff.” He looks at Wesley. “You want to eat with us?”

  “Well . . . I was going to cook something at BOTA House. I usually cook my own meals. I could ah . . . could cook here. If it’s all right with you.” Wesley sees himself inside four walls cooking for this family of two.

  “All right by me. I just got to get back to work. Just don’t let Vernon around no electricity by hisself—cooking and all that.” Holister spits into the can. “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind eating something that was cooked. You want to drive the truck—to get something?”

  “Well, yeah.” I don’t have a driver’s license, the voice in Wesley’s head says. But no words come from his mouth. He’s looking at the National Steel. He can’t keep his eyes off the National Steel. “You’re going to just leave that there?” says Wesley, nodding toward the Dobro.

  “I’ll bring it in the house when I come in. The truck’s parked right around the corner, there in the parking lot. It’s the red one. Keys are in it.”

  As Wesley walks to the truck, the National Steel is in his eye, lying there on the table—its body out of the yellow bag, with the little shined spot near the resonator. By the time he gets some Semi-Chrome polish on that thing, rubbed in, let set, wiped off, it’ll shine like the sun and moon together. And the sound. He already hears the sound.

  Wesley and Vernon get into the red-and-white ’65 Ford truck, slamming the doors. Wesley places both hands on the steering wheel, his feet on the clutch and brake, checks their resistance. The inside of the truck smells wonderful: tobacco, oil, gas, and dirt. A National Steel. Thank you, thank you, Jesus.