His kids bounced along with the scary optimism of youth. Dalton, with ambitions of becoming an architect, worked at a design company in North Carolina. And Dana, who didn’t quite finish college, worked with a producer on Music Row in Nashville. She sent him CDs, sickly pop stuff that you would call gruel if it were food, Reed thought. One of the songs Dana was so proud of had a line, “Carry the gospel to them all,” which Reed persisted in hearing as “Carry the gospel to the mall.” He often kidded her about that song, even singing it on her answering machine.
In a titty bar somewhere on the edge of a river town, Reed ordered a beer. A jejune band was playing country-pop drivel, and he had to listen to half a dozen songs before the girls came on, swinging their fringed anatomies—fringe flying from their tits, fringe hanging between their legs like a collie dog’s skirt.
Reed kept himself fit. Every day he stretched and pumped and jacked up his heart rate. He considered himself sexually attractive and had no trouble getting women. He enjoyed women, made new conquests easily, flirted shamelessly. He’d tuck his finger inside a woman’s blouse and playfully tug her bra strap, or he’d reach down and play with the hem of her short skirt. He would do that even before he knew their names, and they would giggle and swoon. Reed had a certain cockiness, and the way he moved seemed to thrill women. He had simple urges—always present, it seemed, throbbing like a hurt toe and keeping him on high alert, like those power lines humming into the plant.
Sitting at a table near the door, he stayed through two beers, but he did not tip these girls. Tonight he did not feel like folding a five-dollar bill and tucking it under a G-string. He left the titty bar and whisked through the night.
As he crossed the bridge over the river, his mood shifted. He gunned his bike, knowing that just a little slip on a pebble could send him flying. He was eager to check his telephone messages.
His street was quiet and the moon was high when he arrived at his old bungalow, a relic from the 1940s with a pyramid roof and a pillared porch. He left his bike and gear in the garage and went to the backyard where Clarence was in an uproar. The dog was overjoyed to see him, nearly knocking Reed over as he entered the gate. Clarence lunged into the house with him, and Reed hugged him and let him slobber on him.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Reed said to Clarence. “Woof woof. We’re in total agreement.”
The answering machine held nothing significant, nothing from Julia. He sat on the dog-abused sofa with Clarence and read the newspapers, to see what had happened in the world during his absence. Same old thing, he learned quickly. More commotion at the plant, troublemakers demanding more investigations. The wider world in chaos. Clarence rested his head on Reed’s lap and ate corn chips with him.
“Clarence, it says here the cops found five bags of marijuana at a yard sale.” Reed laughed. “Probably antiques.”
He was glad to be home. It was comfortable here now with Clarence. Reed read the obituaries, noting the ages. On the page of personal funeral notices, a guy named Jack, a construction worker, had died at age sixtyeight. Reed said, “Come see Jack in the box, visitation two to four p.m. Sunday.” Reed laughed. Jack could have waited all his life for such a moment and then missed it.
The telephone rang. “Go, killer,” Reed said, opening the back door and shooing Clarence out. He answered the telephone.
“Hey, Reed. This is your Prayer Warrior, calling with your ten o’clock prayer.” It was Burl, his best pal since high school. “Hey, man, are you up?”
“Up? Why wouldn’t I be up? Do you mean Big Reed or Little Reed?”
“No, man, wake up. Listen. This is urgent.”
“What?” Reed settled himself against the wall.
“A while ago I had a heavy, heavy notion, Reed, that you were in need of prayer. I need to pray for you.”
“Pray away, Burl.” Burl could be a Prayer Warrior or a pagan dancer. It was all the same. Inevitably, he was drunk.
“Are you all right, Reed? Was your little trip good?”
“Yeah. I saw the blue flames again.”
“No shit! I wish I’d seen them.”
“Next time.”
“But you shouldn’t hang out at that place.”
“I was way over by the river. That’s O.K.”
Reed told Burl in some detail his dream about the dead woman. “It was so vivid,” he said. “I’m still thinking about it.”
“Write that down, Reed. You could win the Pulitzer Prize.”
“Win what? The tulip surprise?”
Burl chortled. “You need a hearing aid, Reed. I said Pulitzer Prize!”
“You don’t have to yell! I was making a joke.”
“I’m praying for you, Reed.”
“O.K.”
“That business out at the plant is like the butterfly effect,” said Burl. “One thing leading to another.”
“Sure.” What wasn’t involved with the fucking butterfly effect?
“Did you get that test yet?”
“Oh, Burl, go on back to Xanadu, and let me get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“O.K., but I’m praying for you.”
“That’s nice, Burl. Thank you. I’ll pray for you too.”
There was no way to pray for Burl, even if Reed were a praying type. Burl was like an asteroid that made periodic close encounters, but never quite came to earth.
Although Reed was tired, he sat down at his computer. As usual, he had a hard time getting past his screen savers, a dazzling variety of galaxies and nebulae, photographs from the Hubble telescope, gliding silently toward him, changing at twenty-second intervals. They shifted before him, unbelievable, colorful close-ups of outer space—galactic clusters, hot clumps of nebulosity, supernovas, spiral galaxies. The universe. When he stared at these pictures, his mind seemed to empty out. He changed the pictures frequently in order to retain that fresh astonishment.
Finally, he checked his e-mail. He wished Julia had e-mail, but she refused to waste her time with it. He found dozens of new answers to a personal ad he had placed on the Internet. Curious, and with a pleasing sexual stirring, he ran through the responses. His ad had been simple: “Strong, good-looking guy looking for smart, sensitive woman with sense of humor and curiosity. Sex not a requirement. Let’s just hang.” He left his zip code and moniker, “Atomic Man.”
He dumped all the messages with distant zip codes. He read the remaining one, from a zip code near his own, someone calling herself Hot Mama.
“Your ad is too vague. You don’t reveal anything about yourself. Why should I be interested? Your ad seems intended to reel in all women indiscriminately. Who would confess to being insensitive, without humor or curiosity? Sex? Screw you.”
“Goddamn,” Reed said aloud. “I can’t deal with you tonight, Hot Mama.”
He stared at the message until his screen saver came on; the shifting images of the cosmos were hypnotic, and he began to feel sleepy.
Exhausted, he fell into his stale sheets. Sleep wouldn’t come. He was too tired to sleep. He rose and dashed off a message to Hot Mama. “I’m sensitive, with a sense of humor, and I’m loaded with curiosity. I don’t stick to the everyday. I fool around with the cosmos. My favorite poem is ‘Kubla Khan.’ I have a scar on my wrist that resembles a rat’s ass. Why am I telling you all this?”
He sent the message, felt better, then went easily to sleep.
XII
Zigzagging
For a long while, the short stories I wrote zigzagged among longer works of fiction. Stories came sporadically, and that was best, for they offered more surprise and possibility. A story grows not from an idea, or a plot outline, but rather from a buildup of creative energy that seizes an image or a sound. I never know what might burst forth, but it is good to be there to catch it.
—BAM
With Jazz
FROM Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (2001)
I never paid much attention to current events, all the trouble in the worl
d you hear about. I was too busy raising a family. But my children have all gone now and I’ve started to think about things that go on. Why would my daughter live with a man and get ready to raise a baby and refuse to marry the guy? Why would my son live in a cabin by the river and not see a soul for months on end? But that’s just personal. I’m thinking of the bigger picture, too. It seems a person barely lives long enough to begin to see where his little piece fits in the universal puzzle. I’m not old but I imagine that old people start to figure out how to live just when it’s too late.
These thoughts come up at my weekly neighborhood group. It started out as a weight-reducing club, but we kept meeting even after we all got skinny. Now on Fridays after work a bunch of us get together at somebody’s house and talk about life, in a sort of talk-show format. Although we laugh a lot, for us it’s survival. And it helps me think.
It’s so hard to be nice to people. It’s something you have to learn. I try to be nice, but it’s complicated. You start feeling guilty for your own failures of generosity at just about the same point in life when you start feeling angry, even less willing to give. The two feelings collide—feeling gracious and feeling mean. When you get really old, they say, you go right back to being a child, spiteful and selfish, and you don’t give a damn what people think. In between childhood and old age, you have this bubble of consciousness—and conscience. It’s enough to drive you crazy.
After our group session last Friday, I went up to Paducah, across the county line, hoping to see this guy I know. He calls himself Jazz, but his real name is Peter. He always hated that name. Kids in school would tease him. “Where’s your peter?,” “Oh, you don’t look like a peter,” etc. Some kids from my distant past used the word “goober,” the first name I ever heard for the secret male anatomy. I thought they were saying “cooper.” That didn’t make any sense to me. Then I learned that the correct word was “goober.” I learned that in the fourth grade from Donna Lee Washam, the day she led me on an expedition to a black-walnut tree on the far edge of the playground. She came back to the classroom with two black walnuts in her panties and giggled all afternoon as she squirmed in her seat. Across the aisle and a couple of seats up, Jerry Ray Baxter sometimes took his goober out and played with it. He couldn’t talk plain, and after that year he stopped coming to school.
Jazz was at the Top Line, where I thought he’d be. He was lounging at the bar, with a draught beer, shooting the breeze. When he saw me he grinned slowly and pulled a new brassiere out of his pocket, dangling it right there between the jug of beet-pickled eggs and the jug of pickled pigs’ feet. Ed, the bartender, swung his head like he’d seen it all. “There you go again, Jazz, pulling off women’s clothes.”
Jazz said, “No, this is my magic trick.”
I stuffed the bra in my purse. “Thanks, Jazz. I guess you knew my boobs were falling down.”
He came from down in Obion, Tennessee, and grew up duck hunting around Reelfoot Lake. Now he goes to France and brings back suitcases full of French underwear. He sells it to a boutique and occasionally to friends. It’s designer stuff and the sizes are different from here. His exwife gets it at cost from a supplier in Paris where she works. He goes over there once a year or so to see his kids. Jazz works construction and saves his money, and then he quits and lights out for France. I’ve got a drawerful of expensive bras he’s given me—snap-fronts, plunges, crisscrosses, strapless—all in lace and satin.
“That’s a special number,” he said, moving close to me. “Scalloped lace and satin stretch. Molded cup, underwire. I’ll want to check the fitting later.”
I grinned. “We’ll see about that, Jazz. Tonight I feel like getting drunk.”
“You’re gonna be a granny again in a few months, Chrissy. Is that how an old granny’s supposed to act?” he teased.
“But I’m happy, damn it! I feel like I’m in love.”
“One of these days I’ll make you fall in love with me, Chrissy.”
I ordered a bourbon. What Jazz needed, I thought, was a woman who felt romantic about him. But he’d never make a claim on a woman he cared about. He’d always step aside and let the woman go fall in love with some clod who jerked her around.
Glancing up at a TV newsbreak—a local update on water pollution—I said, “All the mussels in the lake are dying. It’s all those pesticides.”
“I heard it was last year’s drought,” said Jazz. “That’s natural.”
“Here I am celebrating a new baby coming into the world—for what? To see a dead lake? And air not fit to breathe?”
Jazz touched my shoulder, to steady me. “World’s always had trouble. No baby ever set foot in the Garden of Eden.”
I laughed. “That’s just like you to say that, Jazz.”
“You think you know me, don’t you?” he said.
“I know you well enough to feel sorry I always treat you so bad.”
Ed set my drink before me and I took it eagerly. I said to Jazz, “Why don’t you ever get mad at me, tell me off?”
He punched my arm, buddy style. “You should never go away mad at a person, because one of you might get killed on the way home.”
The regular crowd was there at the Top Line—good old boys who worked at the plants, guys wandering around loose on a Friday night while their wives took the kids to the mall. A tall man entering the bar caught my eye. He walked like he had money. He had on an iridescent-green shirt, with a subtle paisley design that made my eyes tingle. His pants had cowboy-style piping on the pocket plackets. Over the shirt he wore a suède vest with fuchsia embroidery and zippered pockets.
“That’s Buck Joiner, the radio guy,” Jazz said, reading my mind.
Buck Joiner was the D.J. I listened to while I was getting ready for work. His “Morning Mania” show was a roaring streak of pranks and risqué jokes and call-in giveaways. Once, he actually telephoned Colonel Qaddafi in Libya. He got through to the palace and talked to some official who spoke precise English with a Middle Eastern accent.
As soon as I felt I’d had enough bourbon, I marched over to Buck Joiner’s table, wielding my glass.
“I listen to you,” I said. “I’ve got your number on my dial.”
He seemed bored. It was like meeting Bob Dylan or some big shot you know won’t be friendly.
“I called you up once,” I went on recklessly. “You were giving away tickets to the Ray Stevens show. I was trying to be the twenty-fifth caller. But my timing wasn’t right.”
“Too bad,” he said, deadpan. He was with a couple of guys in suits. Blanks.
“I’ve got to work on my timing.” I paused, scrambling for contact. “You should interview my Friday-afternoon talk group.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re a group of ladies. We get together every Friday and talk about life.”
“What about life?” Out of the side of his face, he smirked for the benefit of the suits.
“The way things are going. Stuff.” My mind went blank. I knew there was more to it than that. Right then, I really wanted him to interview our group. I knew we sparkled with life and intelligence. Rita had her opinions on day care, and Dorothy could rip into the abortion issue, and Phyllis believed that psychiatrists were witch doctors. Me, I could do my Bette Davis imitations.
“Here’s my card,” I said, whipping one out of my purse. I’d ordered these about a month ago, just for the privilege of saying that.
“It’s nice to meet a fan,” he said with stretched lips—not a true smile.
“Don’t give me that, buddy. If it weren’t for your listeners, you wouldn’t be sitting here with all that fancy piping scrawled all over you.”
I rejoined Jazz, who had been watching out for me. “I’d like to see Oprah nail him to the wall,” I said to Jazz.
Of course, I was embarrassed. That was the trouble. I was lost somewhere between being nice and being mean. I shouldn’t drink. I don’t know why I was so hard on the D.J., but he was a man I had depended on to sta
rt my day, and he turned out to be a shit. From now on I’d listen to his show and think, Stuck-up turdface. Yet there I was in a French bra and with an unusual amount of cleavage for this area. I didn’t know what I was getting at. Jazz was smiling, touching my hand, ordering me another drink. Jazz wore patience like adhesive tape.
In bits and pieces, I’ve told this at the Friday talk group: My first husband, Jim Ed, was my high-school boyfriend. We married when we were seniors, and they didn’t let me graduate, because I was pregnant. I used to say that I barely understood how those things worked, but that was a lie. Too often I exaggerate my innocence, as if trying to excuse myself for some of the messes I’ve gotten myself into. Looking back now, I see that I latched on to Jim Ed because I was afraid there’d never be another opportunity in my life, and he was the best of the pickings around there. That’s the way I do everything. I grab anything that looks like a good chance, right then and there. I even tend to overeat, as if I’m afraid I won’t ever get another good meal. “That’s the farm girl in you,” my second husband, George, always said. He was an analytical person and had a theory about everything. When he talked about the Depression mentality of our parents’ generation he made it sound physically disgusting. He had been to college. I never did go back and get my high-school diploma, but that’s something I’m thinking about doing now. George couldn’t just enjoy something for what it was. We’d grill steaks and he’d come up with some reason why we were grilling steaks. He said it went back to caveman behavior. He said we were acting out an ancient scene. He made me feel trapped in history, as though we hadn’t advanced since cavemen. I don’t guess people have changed that much, though, really. I bet back in caveman times there was some know-it-all who made his woman feel dumb.
Patchwork Page 39