Playing With Matches

by Carolyn Wall

  “We do,” I say.

  He tucks his long chin in. I note the knobs of his Uriah Heep fingers; long, thin feet that must require special-made shoes. He reminds me of a tree bent by centuries of wind.

  Raoul says, helpfully, “Horse, here, ran a laundry and”—in his chair, Raoul makes a girly move with his hips—“sexino in Texas.”

  Sexino?

  “One-armed bandits, video porn, girls in the back,” Raoul explains. “He was just passin’ through, seein’ his mama, somebody asks for his license. Horse jumps outa his car and beats the dude up. But the dude’s dead now, and the judge says on account of Horse boxed in the army, he’s gettin’ life.”

  “That’s the shits,” Wesley commiserates.

  They read. They’ve written about convenience stores and cops and sex, grinding poverty and family, too much meth and not enough corn bread. Songs of the South, I think.

  Although they could keep paper in their cells, they want me to have their stories. I collect the pencils. Horse hands in his work without reading it aloud. The guard marches them out. Beyond the door, Raoul picks up a grin and walks with a bounce. A front, I think, a cover for who he really is.

  Clea Shine is in the jail—and this is what it’s like. Good God.

  I’m supposed to leave quickly now, find my own way out, but, as I walk, I look over Horse’s story. It’s about three guards who beat a sex offender senseless. One of his eyeballs is wrenched out of its socket; his arm is broken; twelve tiny bones in his foot are crushed. He spends eight months in the infirmary.

  On my way out, an old guy with a mop and bucket of water is swabbing the entryway. He moves closer than is smart and murmurs, “Miss, some of us ol’-timers, we wanna tell you—we knew your mama.”

  “What?” I must be falling down stairs. I am floating in space.

  “Sometime Clarice here. Trustee slip her in.”

  The foyer stretches ahead, distorting so that the door is unreachable. In this long, long space, I am exposed.

  Wheezer comes up and puts a hand on my shoulder, takes an umbrella from the stand. We go out into rain that’s lightened to a fine mist.

  God, God, something has stripped off my careful mosaic and uncovered Clea Shine.

  I don’t know if Wheezer heard.

  34

  We stand under the prison’s overhang while I blink against the mist and try to clear my head. The air is fresh but oddly not cooler. After the real storm has come and gone, the humidity will be insufferable.

  Wheezer says, “Listen. Thanks for doing this, Clea. It was a lot to lay on you, but I’m not above begging.”

  “You’re welcome”—I look up at him—“Francis? I don’t know what to call you.”

  There’s a roughness to him that neither shaving nor scrubbing nor being a chaplain can erase. He could dress in the finest clothes and scour his skin till there was nothing left, and he’d still be the boy I found under the house.

  “Call me Wheezer,” he says, grinning. “You’re the only one who ever did—you and Finn. Hey, you’re making a difference here. We’d like you to come back tomorrow, if you can swing it—the warden, your students, me.”

  “I was only with them half a day. How—”

  “You could start around nine, be finished by noon. Maybe Friday too, if that suits you.”

  Three days in a row. Wheezer was right about himself—he’ll do what he needs to, stand up for his cause. Did I, at this end of my journey, emerge nearly as strong?

  But I have not yet come to the end of my story.

  “Wheezer,” I say, “why are you here? Why didn’t you run? You must have terrible memories of this place.”

  He takes his time answering. “No better or worse than yours. I heard about the way your mom was, and all.”

  Here is someone to talk to, not like Thomas, who ate and slept in our house but lived somewhere else. We seldom spoke. He’s never even asked me about the raised lines on my arms or my feet or my belly.

  “Sometimes it all catches up with me,” I say. “Like a ball of yarn that wants to unravel, you know? Other times, they’re more feelings than thoughts, and I have to find the right words to express them.”

  “You did pretty good in your book.”

  “Fictionalized,” I tell him.

  “Don’t underestimate yourself. You’re great with words. I read the reviews.”

  “Wheezer. Your life here was far worse than mine.”

  “Yours was bad, Clea. You didn’t deserve it. No kid does.”

  “The Oatys kept you under their house, for God’s sake. I’ve thought about you and wondered what kind of kid—adult—does it take to survive that?”

  The rain has stopped. We walk to the sally port and wait while we’re buzzed through. Wheezer makes little puffing noises with his lips. “Surviving is a basic thing. Getting by. Staying alive in whatever way we can. It doesn’t mean we make right choices or drive fine cars or have good jobs. It means we found a way not to die. I survived.”

  “I know about that,” I say. I push my sleeve up, turn my arm over, and show him a dozen short lines and scimitars. “Sometimes Luz touches them, but she never asks.”

  “She will.”

  “I know. And I guess—I’ll tell her the truth.”

  “You’re that kind of mom.”

  “So—”

  “Those two Oatys were my uncles, the old geezer my grandpa.”

  “My God.”

  Wheezer lifts his shoulders, like a kid. “My mom was their sister. My dad and the two uncles ran a meth lab back in the woods, but my daddy wasn’t very good at it. Blew up stuff, killed himself and my mom too. After that the two Oatys brought me here. But the old man threw a ringtailed fit, said he was gonna die for sure with this skinny-assed kid around. So they—they put me under the house. I was there two, maybe three, weeks when you came along.”

  My throat aches. “You were a strange sight, that’s for sure.”

  “I guess so. I sure was glad to see you. But then you went away, and I thought you weren’t coming back. I thought maybe I dreamed you.”

  “I went to get Finn,” I say. “And then Auntie. After that, everything got big and noisy.”

  “Yes. I thank you for speaking up.”

  “Just words,” I say. “What happened when Pilcher took you away? Where’d you go?”

  “That was just the beginning. I ran off every chance I got. Nobody wanted this wormy little runt, sickly looking, no color in my skin. By the time I was twelve, I drank every damn thing I could get my hands on.”

  I know about drunks. As part of the sisterhood, I can’t count the number I’ve plucked from the gutter. And bathed. And given a meal. I don’t do it to be Christlike or out of any sense of charity. Unlike some of the sisters who can give of themselves till there’s nothing left, I think something different. These folks who live in the gutter, on the edge of life, are only people filled with hurt. When I first left here, I did that too. But the alcoholics. I know those broken blood vessels and anguished eyes. “It still deals you trouble.”

  “Every day of my life,” he says, “like a patch of poison ivy. One minute I can work it through, and ten minutes later I’d kill for a drink. It’s just gonna be like that.”

  I ache for him. “How long has it been?”

  “This time? One hundred and eighty-two days. Hell, we hold AA meetings twice a day, right here at the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center.”

  “Not just for canasta and funerals anymore?”

  “Well, those too,” he says, grinning. “Those righteous ladies hightail it outa there before we drunks show up.” He looks along the lane to where my mother’s house stood. “Luz said you work with an oblate.”

  “An interdenominational order.”

  “Good for you. How’d you get from here to God?”

  It feels good to talk. “How did you?”

  He barks out a laugh. “Struck by lightning. One night at a meeting, I was standin’ in the b
ack with a cup of coffee in my hand, and—there it was. I guess somebody’d made the right kind of speech. I nearly fell over myself, confessing my sins. Folks picked me up and took me in.”

  “Finally, the right kind of people.”

  “Yup. Went on to a little podunk college, seminary.”

  “Same here,” I tell him. I like looking this man in the eye. It feels clean.

  He puts an arm around me and gives me a squeeze. “I’m glad you came back. So I could say thank you. Now you need to go see Finn.”

  “Finn! He’s still here?” And my gaze automatically shifts to the river, to the great oak trees.

  He points across the field. “Past the poplars, where the creek runs through. He’s got a place in a clearing.”

  “He became a recluse—”

  “I take groceries sometimes, or a new pair of boots.”

  “Whatever happened to his daddy? Is he still here at the Farm?”

  “Ask Finn.”

  “I will. In fact, I’m going now.”

  “I didn’t mean this minute—”

  “I’ll follow the creek, Wheezer. I’ll be fine.”

  “Shit,” he says, and thrusts the umbrella at me. “Take the right fork into the woods! You couldn’t miss it in good daylight, but—”

  “I’ll be fine. Tell the kids I’ll be home directly.”

  I’m amazed to be walking away from the prison. Apparently, it isn’t my time yet.

  And I need a few minutes of solitude. I intended to come to Call while I walked, but the woods are dripping and messy, the road muddy, and night is coming on.

  I wonder what it would have been like if Finn and I had stayed friends. If we’d ended up together, say.

  35

  I’d always thought love was a waste of time, but there it was. It hurts to remember. I was, literally and figuratively, right off the boat.

  I did not fall on my knees in the presence of Professor Thomas Ryder, but his shyness and his intelligence thrilled me—the way he looked at me over his glasses, as if, finally, he’d found something worth looking at. He taught biology at a private university in Dandridge. I was in my twenties, he in his late thirties. I think that’s why I liked him—he’d lived long enough to know who he was. With a funny little grin, he told me his students razzed him because he and I walked the campus hand in hand. Said he felt like a kid.

  And he looked like one—that gray hair tumbled and falling over his forehead, his shirt untucked in back. More often than not, he wore mismatched socks. He was long and lean, and even after showering and splashing on aftershave, Thomas still smelled of formaldehyde and other science-lab things.

  Sometimes he wore bedroom slippers to class, and at home he could never find his books or his papers or his pen. He misplaced the mail, his coffee cup, his bookmark, and, sometimes in the park, his old dog Ruff. When Ruff died, we took a shovel and buried him on a quiet piece of shoreline. Thomas was more bereft than any man I’d ever known. Just like me, he had unlit corners. How could I possibly not care for him?

  Thomas had these funny eyebrows too—not long or particularly thick, but they seemed to run every which way and were so tangled that when he combed his hair, he combed them too.

  The only family that was left to care about him was a pair of elderly aunts in nursing homes in Florida. Most nights, he came to the door of the efficiency apartment where I lived, and together we went out and walked along the beach. When it rained, we stayed in. Conversation usually ended up in the bedroom.

  Thomas’s hands were large and square, his fingers blunt. They found corners of me I didn’t know existed, and whether he was on top of or under me, he lifted and thrilled me. Then we lay on our backs, exhausted and caught up in the damp sheets. Thomas slept while I lay, wondering how in the world we had found each other.

  Saturday nights, we sat in the broken-down chairs of coffee shops while we drank Arabica roast and discussed the world’s problems and how we would solve them. We dissected books and movies and the six-o’clock news. We rearranged the country’s politics. Thomas was a good man with a quick mind.

  He made love beautifully, with strong, slow hands and his hair falling over his forehead.

  “I was wondering, Clea,” he said one night when we were drinking coffee, “if you would just consider marrying me.”

  I watched customers pick up their coffees in cardboard containers and juggle apricot cake in waxed-paper squares. “Thomas—”

  “You’re the one woman I want to spend my life with,” he said. “Think about it, will you? At least—don’t say no.”

  But being with Thomas was like some grand rehearsal—I kept waiting for the show to start.

  “I have to,” I said.

  There was a hopeful hitch to his untidy brows, and he leaned forward and laced his fingers on the table. “Have to what—”

  “Say no,” I said.

  But then I learned something about myself.

  Sister Margaret Redemptor had sent me to teach in a backwater community where the district needed someone to work with remedial reading students. The kids sat on the floor in what I had learned to call Indian-style. Now they called it crisscross applesauce.

  However far behind they had fallen, these kids’ ears were screwed on, waiting for words that would come out of my mouth. I’d brought along a copy of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. I settled in to tell the story and was amazed at the rise and ring of my own voice.

  Then I got down on the floor and showed them page one, and the printing of words and how, together, they made a sentence. They went to their tables and fisted their pencils. I distributed paper, and on the sad green chalkboard I drew a capital A.

  “Look!” I said. “Both sides of this letter seem to be falling in!”

  Their mouths came open.

  I asked, “What do you think is holding them up?”

  And so it went, unorthodox and lovely.

  Thomas said those same things about me. I doubted the lovely part, but I allowed the rest. I liked his company, his funny habits, and the adoring look in his eyes.

  On Tuesdays, he sometimes drove me to Fong’s, where the sisters met, and ate kung pao chicken and read a magazine until it was time to go home. Then we’d curl up on the sofa and fool around, end up in his bed.

  Thomas had a small patch of gray hair on his chest, and while I twined my fingers in it, I laid my ear to his ribs. I loved to hear his strong heart beat.

  He had fallen in love with me, and I couldn’t get over that.

  He asked me again to marry him, and I said yes.

  36

  I wonder what made Finn move so far back in the woods. But, then, he’d lived in a tree. Maybe he never grew fit for society. I realize, now, I haven’t eaten all day. And, Lord, I wish I had a flashlight. A million years ago this creek was just a dent in the land, but now it’s racketing and foamy. On the back side of the Farm’s big house, tree branches and debris crash into the False River, then churn south into the Pearl and on to the blue-water Gulf of Mexico. Payback for what nasty weather it’s shoving our way.

  I am soaked to the skin from the wet scrub, and before long I see what must be Finn’s place. If it is, he grows a few straggly vegetables, keeps a goat tied in the yard, and owns a snapping hellhound of a dog. A few pieces of old farm equipment lay in the yard like fossils, shiny with rain.

  It’s the woods that disturb me, the trees and vines leaving only the smallest clearing. I wonder if Finn uses a hatchet—and how often—to cut the kudzu back, trim the brush. The place looks bleak, like someday the undergrowth might just take it over, take it back, and Finn along with it.

  The ribby white dog plants its feet and bares its teeth, growls rising from its belly, coming up through its throat.

  “Good dog,” I murmur, and stand stiller than still. But I’ve folded the umbrella and hold its point at the ready. “Good boy, good dog.”

  The hair stands up on the back of its neck. The goat watches me from the end of it
s rope.

  “Finn?” I call out, risking a bite, rabies shots, bleeding to death in this back of beyond. “Finn, are you here?”

  The dog steps off to the side, but the barking is incessant and loud enough to be heard in False River, and he snap snaps with his teeth.

  Who was it, Auntie or Shookie—someone told me Finn lived in a shack. Whoever said it was right. The house is faced with beige stucco that’s chipping away in chunks—sills, sashes, and door frame rotting, and the whole thing no bigger than one small room. By the door a barrel is half full of rainwater, and there’s another in the side yard for burning trash. I step up to the door and knock, then knock again, then try turning the knob. Hammer with my fist and call out, “It’s Clea Ryder. Clea Shine. Finn?”

  There’s a small window in front and one in the back, and both are covered inside with yellowed newspaper, tears mended with tape, some of which doesn’t stick anymore. I cup my hands to the glass but must stay watchful of the dog, and anyway, it’s impossible to see inside.

  The dog flinches and turns on its tail, snapping at fleas. I wonder if I made a mistake in direction, trying to clear the mind-clutter while I walked. Maybe I didn’t follow the creek far enough, or I have come the wrong way after all. One thing’s sure—this little house is locked up tight, and if it weren’t for the animals—which someone must surely be feeding—I’d have thought no one lived here.

  I take the same trail back.

  The prison yard lights are on now, illuminating the asphalt road. From here I can make out the shape of Auntie’s tall house, where a car has just pulled into the drive. I see a man getting out, a shape in the dark—not a neighbor or the sheriff but one I know well.

  He steps onto Auntie’s front porch, which no one ever uses. The door opens, a slant of yellow lighting up the red salvia that’s planted there, in tins. He disappears inside. Thomas Ryder.