More of This World or Maybe Another

by Barb Johnson

  “Yeah,” Philippe says, “it’s about time, I guess.” He rocks out of his chair and slaps his thighs.

  Everyone looks at the barn, and the hair on Dooley’s neck stands up.

  Uncle Philippe darts around the fire and heads right for Dooley, scooping him up before Dooley has a chance to run inside. “Free swats!” all the uncles whoop. Philippe flips Dooley over his shoulder and carries him all the way back to the barn, the other uncles swatting at Dooley’s butt, once for each birthday. On the back side of the barn is a slaughter pen, and Uncle Philippe sets Dooley down next to it. Reet’s in the pen, running frantic circles, her head tipped to one side, her ears up, eyes searching for Patsy, her mother.

  The reason for the roasting cage and Dooley’s part in it becomes clear, and, too late, he turns to run back toward the house. He’s surrounded by uncles.

  “You gonna do fine,” Uncle Drouet says. When Dooley tries to back up, Drouet puts his hand on Dooley’s shoulder, not pushing, but not moving aside, either.

  The ground feels like it’s pitching, like a boat on water, so that Dooley has to grab at something to keep from falling. He leans into Uncle Philippe, who’s come alongside him. “She ain’t never gonna be right, hoss,” his uncle says.

  Dooley wonders if such a thing could possibly be true. It seems that if it was true, then everyone would believe the same thing. There’s only one truth, is what Dooley has always thought. “She is too gonna be right,” Dooley says to the ground, careful to keep his eyes off of Reet. “She just needs some time.”

  Uncle Drouet’s hand tightens on Dooley’s shoulder. “C’mon, now,” he says, quieter than Dooley has ever heard him say anything. Uncle Philippe guides Dooley into the small pen with Reet; the other uncles stand along the edges. Dooley knows there’s no turning back. If he refuses, one of the uncles will do what he won’t. Dooley tries to think out whether he’d rather be killed by someone he knows or by a stranger.

  “Slipknot,” one of the uncles says, handing Dooley some rope. Dooley kneels in the dirt with Reet, and she stops her circling and noses at him, smells something wrong and goes back to circling again. Dooley makes a slipknot with his stiff, jammed fingers. He fumbles around a little and then loops the slipknot over Reet’s back legs, binds back and front legs together, away from her neck. The dark cloud of the Holy Spirit hovers over the pen and gives Dooley Its awful command.

  “Don’t be such a duh-doot,” his uncles holler when Dooley starts to cry. He’s past caring who sees him cry, though.

  This cochon du lait in front of him was Reet this morning, her neck getting stronger, her eyes straight ahead in the little walking chute. She flops her head back into Dooley’s chest now, and he pulls her up next to his face, puts his arms around her, runs one hand down her smooth snout. He sees stars blinking in the dark clouds over him and realizes he’s forgotten to breathe.

  “Good pig,” he says to Reet, who is a baby, the way T-Ya is a baby, who still needs her mother. “Sweet pig,” he says, rocking her. A group of egrets flies over the pen, brightens the sky for a few seconds and then disappears. “Everything is fine,” Dooley lies. Reet yelps, and Patsy answers from the barn where she’s throwing herself against the door trying to get out. The noise cuts right through Dooley.

  Uncle Philippe gives Dooley the knife. “Make sure you hit it right the first time, now,” he says, “or she’s gon’ suffer.”

  Dooley’s seen the suffering. Seen pigs chased for sport before the cut is made, so that when the knife finally goes in, the storm in the animal’s pounding heart empties in a quick, bright shower, everyone cheering, even when they mean to scream. Or cry. Dooley wishes his daddy was here, wonders if he knows about this. Wonders if he’s maybe planned this with the uncles, a question Dooley will never, never ask.

  His hand does what the Holy Spirit requires, but Dooley doesn’t watch. Un patate, deux patate. He sits with Reet’s back against his chest. He pulls her floppy head up, cradling it in the crook of his arm, clearing a path for the knife, his leg braced over Reet’s bound legs. Dooley knows it’s wrong to sit this way, to aim the knife back toward his own body, but if the sharp blade slips from Reet’s throat, if Dooley stabs himself in the process, he was only doing what the Holy Spirit asked. He holds Reet to his chest and makes himself go still inside so she doesn’t have to feel his scared feelings.

  It’s some other boy and some other hand pushing the point of the knife in, slitting Reet’s throat. Trois patate, quatre patate, Reet’s body jerks a little and then goes still. That same strange boy hangs Reet upside down on the hook at the back of the barn, a dark world puddling on the ground beneath her. The uncles slap the boy’s back and say excited things. Dooley…they say. Dooley…

  The real Dooley opens and closes his bloody hands, concentrates entirely on the sticky sound. The real Dooley stands looking off toward the bayou, not at the dark diesel clouds, which have filled the afternoon sky completely, but at a constellation of snowy egrets perched in the bare cypress trees, watching, quiet, still.

  Issue Is

  The courtyard is crowded with locals, the humidity and the stench of a hundred-year-old sewer leak having kept all the tourists in the main building of the bistro. Delia’s table is snugged into the curved corner at the base of a winding stair. Across from the stairs is a storeroom that houses the overstock of beer and wine and olive salad, a room entered frequently by waiters who mostly emerge empty-handed, the smell of pot chuffing from their clothes. Delia loves the Napoleon House. It’s where she and Maggie had their first official date. And she loves this corner table with its unobstructed view of the whole patio. It’s their table.

  She adjusts the straps on her new sandals and knows for certain that it was a mistake to wear them. They were a gift from Maggie, who has just gotten back from a business trip to Vancouver, home to the international chain of high-end coffee shops for which she is an executive. This afternoon when Delia pulled the slingbacks from their delicate nest of tissue, she found a card tucked at the bottom of the box. “M.,” the card said, “it was lovely as always, and you’re lovely. Think of me when you wear these in that hot town of yours.” Several X’s and O’s. No signature. Delia slipped the card in the pocket of her blouse, right over her heart, and began to wait for the moment when she would have to ask Maggie about it.

  This morning, they stayed in bed late, filling the room with sharp, shining incantations: the ohh and ohh and you-you-you of first-day-back sex. Later, Maggie made grits and grillades. When Delia pulled the coffee from the stove to pour it, that’s when Maggie handed her the shoebox with a flourish, with flowers from their garden, with a Slingbacks pour vous! followed by a story about how, between meetings, she’d spent some time shopping. She sealed the lie with a kiss on Delia’s mouth. It’s exactly the sort of moment and exactly the sort of lie that Delia has recently feared would be the end of them.

  “Baby love!” Maggie chirps at Delia now, crossing the courtyard after a trip to the primitive bathroom, an awful room that requires a snaky trek through the bistro’s kitchen. Delia admires Maggie’s grace, her posture, her loose-hipped, duck-footed gait with its remnant of ballet lessons in it.

  When she sits, Maggie tucks a long, muscled leg beneath herself. “This just in,” she says. “Brandi now hearts Jason in plaid pants, dude.” Maggie often doctors the pedestrian sentiments she finds on the bathroom wall by adding even more hackneyed phrases to them. She won’t put up with trite graffiti. “It’s an assault on the public, right?” From behind one ear she pulls a brown eyebrow pencil and sets it on the table next to a bowl of olives.

  They have always written on the bathroom wall here with an eyebrow pencil. Song lyrics with double meanings—If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?—and lists of items that should be banned: plaid pants, dude.

  Delia tries to catch the eye of their waiter, Sal, who, with the other waiters, stands leaning against the far wall next to a cigarette machine. She’s thirsty and anx
ious to give her senses a soaking.

  “Aren’t you going in?” Maggie tips her head in the direction of the bathroom. “Don’t you want to write something?”

  “Not yet,” Delia says. Her heart tries to engage, slips gears and fails. She looks across the courtyard at Sal and shows him her thirstiest face. He pushes himself off the wall with the bottom of his foot and trundles over.

  “Maggie, Delia, how are you?” They’ve known Sal for every one of the ten years he’s worked there. He’s their waiter.

  “We’re good,” Maggie answers without looking at Delia and then asks after Sal.

  “Sweetheart, I’m in love,” Sal says, swooning. “I’m just all aquiver.”

  Delia gives him a smile. Sal falls in “love” easily and a lot. As though love enters through the openings of the body.

  “Pimm’s Cup?” Sal asks.

  “No, honey,” Delia says, scooting her chair back and crossing her legs. “We’d like a couple of beers. Abita, please. Or,” Delia turns to Maggie, “maybe you want something else? Something different?”

  “I’ll have a beer if you’re having one.” Maggie digs first in her own purse and then in Delia’s until she finds a nail file. She files her nails the way some people smoke, reflexively and excessively.

  Delia flips her sunglasses up on top of her head, squeezes one eye shut against the midafternoon glare and trains the other eye on Maggie, waiting.

  They’ve rescheduled this outing twice now, its ostensible purpose to coordinate their busy schedules, to find a way to spend more leisure time together, a suggestion from the therapist they’ve been seeing. It seems really artificial to Delia that they should have to plan their leisure time, but she knows something has to give. May already have given.

  “Hey, how did Dooley’s move go?” Maggie asks, shifting in her chair, sliding the bowl of olives left, then right, then left again.

  Delia’s brother, Dooley, had been living with them so he could put all his money into getting his band off the ground. Moving out was a pretty big deal, a milestone, and one more item to add to the long list of things Maggie has missed because of all the traveling she has to do for work. Her concern for Dooley is genuine, but it’s expressed here, at least in part, in an effort to divert the attention she senses Delia is about to aim at her. Maggie’s debutante background has made her a genius at sidestepping unpleasant conversation.

  “Dooley’s move went fine. He made me freeze you some cake from the housewarming.” Dooley adores Maggie.

  “Mmm. Cake.” Maggie nudges Delia’s leg. “And you? What’s new with you?”

  Delia recrosses her legs. “I’m not sure I know the answer to that one.” The slingback on her foot swings, tick-tock, tick-tock, a timer running down, a shoe bomb about to go off. “You ready to schedule some leisure time?”

  “Can we do it later,” Maggie asks, “like after we’re dead?” She leans forward and drops the nail file back in Delia’s purse, then tucks her short green skirt beneath herself.

  “Now is later,” Delia says. She’s not crazy about the stupid therapy assignments, either. Their therapist said they need to work on getting their priorities in order. “What if her priorities are screwed up?” Delia asked Maggie after they got that piece of advice. “What if a month from now she quits being a therapist and goes out to the woods to be a forest ranger so she doesn’t have to talk to anyone? What if when people ask her, she says, ‘I never should’ve been a therapist. I had my head up my ass the whole time.’ What if she says that?”

  And now they’re scheduling leisure time. Delia’s not sure how much good it will do since most of their leisure time is spent catching up on things that are already over. It’s always the same. Before they get a chance to work out what they’ve been bickering about, Maggie has to leave. The whole thing makes Delia long for the sort of marriage her parents’ generation had. Or Delia’s idea of it, anyway. No poking, no probing, no therapy. It required a lot of Valium, Delia guesses, but what doesn’t?

  Maggie extracts her PDA from deep in her gigantic purse. Unlike an affair with another woman, whom Delia neither knows nor has to see, Maggie’s affair with her PDA is right in Delia’s face. Not in their bed, exactly, but never far from it. Delia hisses at the evil little intruder.

  Maggie holds up the PDA and displays it like a spokesmodel. See? the gesture says. I’m doing my part. She plucks the stylus from its holder to show that she’s ready, that she’s taking this seriously.

  There’s no sign of guilt on Maggie’s face, only a distracted smile, an expression that so captures Maggie’s essence that Delia thinks of it as belonging to a painting, Maggie at Rest. It’s that very look that makes Delia question her interpretation of the card she found at the bottom of the shoebox this afternoon. She’s been trying to talk herself into thinking that maybe the shoes were an innocent gift from a business associate, that, at worst, Maggie is guilty of being a romantic hack for trying to pass them off as a thoughtful present she picked out just for Delia. And are shoes really a sexy kind of gift? Delia supposes that they are for Maggie, who is the Imelda Marcos of the lesbian community.

  Sal is leaning against the wall again, and Delia watches Maggie turn her hands up to show him they hold no drink. The waiter slaps his palm to his forehead and rushes to the bar.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Delia says. “Not if you think it won’t do any good.” Delia’s tired. The idea of giving up takes hold in her mind.

  Maggie squints into her PDA, taps screen after screen of Delia doesn’t know what. “Look at this,” she says, holding out the device for Delia to see. There’s a picture of the two of them from some Mardi Gras past. Arm in arm, they lean against the window of the Laundromat that Delia owns, the sidewalk in front of them dark except for the glow from the snack machine inside. The cardboard hands of The Scream are clamped over Delia’s ears, and her eyes are painted wide with shock, her mouth circled in black, a fixed O of horror. Next to her, Maggie is draped in bright multicolored streamers, a birthday cake for a hat. Delia wants to ask how this picture came to be on the PDA. And why. But she knows that she’ll doubt every explanation that points to love. The words might still be true, but maybe not in the way Delia has thought.

  She fishes around in her wavy hair, which the humidity has tightened into curls, hooks a ringlet and pulls on it until it’s straight, then throws it back. Delia wishes Sal would come with the drinks so she can get herself to an easier, if not a better, place. It would be nice to spend an afternoon drinking and reciting bawdy poems—There was a gay man from Khartoum—or indulging in prattle as they used to in the early years, when Delia’s Laundromat was still new and Maggie spent her time changing majors at the rich kids’ college Uptown. In retrospect it seems like a simpler time, though Delia knows it was just a different kind of complicated. She decides to keep the card hidden awhile longer, to give Maggie the chance to bring up the real source of the shoes, to say something, anything, about the maker of the X’s and O’s.

  “Delia,” Maggie says, from what seems a great distance. “The shoes. You’re ruining your new shoes.”

  Delia looks down at her foot. She’s been smacking the delicate leather of the slingback against the leg of Maggie’s chair. “Where’d you say you got these?” Delia asks.

  “There are so many new shops on Robson,” Maggie says. “You should see.”

  “But these particular shoes…?”

  “We went a lot of places…” Maggie says and stops herself. “I can’t remember, sweetie. Robson Street somewhere, I guess.”

  After a minute, Maggie reaches down to stop Delia’s foot, which has begun kicking again. While she’s down there, she adjusts the sugar packets that have been tucked under the feet of their table to keep it steady.

  “I wonder if there’s much lead in all that crumbling paint,” Maggie muses, sitting up. She points at the flaking paint on the curved walls of the historic staircase, taking Delia’s eyes up and away from the shoes. “It could
fall in our drinks,” Maggie says, “and then we’d have to ride the special bus to school.”

  Delia catches sight of a bruise stamped on Maggie’s calf, the size and shape and color of a dark pansy. When did it happen? How? A comma of hair keeps sneaking away from its home behind Delia’s ear and sticking to her cheek. She loops it back into place, then runs one finger over the large scar beneath her bangs, the wrinkled remains of a childhood injury that itches when she’s upset.

  Waiting for words, true words, any words, Delia tries offering her leg for touching. She watches her own calf, watches Maggie’s bare toe rise and fall along it, but can’t feel the simple animal comfort of it. She wants Maggie to confess without being asked, or to say, “Gay Steve from Seattle gave me those. He got a pair for himself, too.”

  “Do you think that’s what’s made Sal so spacey?” Maggie asks. “All that crumbling lead paint?”

  “Could be,” Delia sighs. “Probably other things, too, though.” She juts her chin toward the bar where Sal is chatting up a fireman. Delia stares hard at him. Sal finally turns back toward the courtyard and holds up one finger to show that their drinks are on the way.

  The sound of Ella Fitzgerald warbling on a scratchy LP—a song about birds and bees and doing it—fills the patio. It was the first thing Maggie ever wrote on the bathroom wall with eyebrow pencil, an invitation she’d sent Delia in to read. Let’s do it; let’s fall in love, Maggie wrote that night several months after they’d begun dating, after they’d gotten up, unsteady and oblivious to the other patrons, and danced to the song right there in the courtyard of the Napoleon House. Like a dream. Like Delia and Maggie when they were new.

  Under the table, Delia taps her feet to the music. The smack of the slingbacks’ expensive soles on the brick is high-pitched and hollow, like the disapproving click of a tongue. She imagines that Maggie has planned this, has probably tipped Sal to play the song so that they can dance. As though they can waltz away their troubles, dip and glide across this rocky time, back to their sure beginnings. Delia closes her eyes, lets the moment pass in silence.