She looks down at him and frowns. “Why are you in such a hurry?”
“I’m not in a hurry. I’ve just got a few things to do.” He is getting a little crazy. Now he has to go by the bank and rent a safe-deposit box. He did this kind of thing for his aunt Sarah, then for his mother, but neither of them had to go into a nursing home. Altogether, a goodly portion of his last ten years has been spent helping with their bank and personal business. He’s pretty good at it by now. He thinks about some kind of business he can head up, where people with too little to do can be plugged into old people who need help. It would just take some organizing. He thinks about the problem of feeble elderly wives who have only their elderly husbands to look after them.
“I used to come home,” she says. “Now I visit home. I appreciate you helping me out.”
“You’re welcome. I’m glad to do it.”
Lil thinks about all those bonds. Would they give her an opening to talk to Carl about her troubles with Tad? Maybe that is not such a good idea. When she gets a little worse off, maybe she’ll tell him. Is there a good reason to keep all that from him? On the other hand, why bring it up now? Somehow she wants to tell him. But if she does, she’s afraid she’ll cry.
IN THE PARKING LOT, he folds her walker, then loads it, and her, into the car, and they head back to Rose-haven. He had planned to talk about her driving—while they were alone in her apartment—but he flat forgot. And she’s seemed to back off the subject somewhat, hasn’t mentioned wanting to drive again. Maybe she’s made a private decision. Maybe he should let it ride for a while.
Darla’s Flap and Snap
“I WROTE A SONG—the words,” says Carl. He is in Aunt Lil’s room at Rosehaven two days later, sitting in her Kennedy rocker, facing her.
She sits in her La-Z-Boy. “What kind of song?”
“It’s a sort of country song—an idea Mr. Flowers had.”
“Well, let me hear it. I like Mr. Flowers. He pays attention to everybody.”
“I don’t have any music yet. Maybe Mr. Flowers will write the music.” Carl thinks of this as a joke, then considers it seriously.
“Well, that’s just dandy. I’m glad he got in behind you. You’ve always wanted to do something like that, haven’t you?”
“I think so. It was easy. It just sort of all came out at once. It almost wrote itself. In less than an hour.”
“Let’s go out on the porch so I can smoke me one. I’ll bet he’s out there.”
It takes her two or three tries to stand. Carl moves her walker in front of her—she will allow him to do that. He knows what she will and won’t allow: Help with coat or sweater, yes. Help to or from bathroom, no. Into car, no. Out of car, yes. Standing from an armless chair, yes. With arms, no.
The regulars are on the porch: Mr. Flowers; Mrs. Maudie Lowe, the little woman; Mrs. Beatrice Satter-white, the three-wheeled-walker woman; the two silent ones by the door; and Mrs. Clara Cochran, the one who curses and has the glass eye. There are several empty rockers among them. Carl and Aunt Lil take two. Mr. Flowers sits off to the side, in the sun, reading a magazine. Carl sees Furniture in the magazine’s title. On the flat, wooden porch rail beside Mr. Flowers is a red Bible, dog-eared, holding inserts and place-markers.
Carl is reluctant to mention to Mr. Flowers the song he’s written, for fear of being too forward and then maybe of being kind of adopted by him, maybe talked to and talked to and talked to. On the other hand, he wonders if Mr. Flowers might be able to put some good music to the song, since he knows about traditional music.
Aunt Lil says, “A squirrel started crossing right out there the other day, right there in the driveway, and here comes a car, and that squirrel goes this way and then back that way and then this way. It was the funniest thing.”
“They need a squirrel safety patrol,” says Mrs. Satter-white.
“I was a grade mother for the safety patrol for nine years,” says Clara Cochran. “I got so goddamned tired of Washington, D.C., I didn’t know what to do. We took a trip up there every year.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that language, Clara,” says Mrs. Satterwhite.
“I don’t know what I’d do if I had to stop driving,” says Aunt Lil.
A silence falls.
“Well, it’s something we all need to think about,” Carl says to Aunt Lil quietly, so the others can’t hear. Has he stumbled into the right opening? “Everybody has to stop sooner or later.” He looks at her. She is staring straight ahead. He waits for a follow-up.
Nothing.
“Ha,” says Mr. Flowers. “There’s another song for you, Carl: ‘The Safety Patrol Song.’ Did you do anything with the one I gave you the other day?”
“I did. I wrote it. It just came all at once—the whole thing.”
“Good. Let’s hear it.”
“I can’t write music. I just did the words.”
“Have you got them written down?”
“I do.”
“Good. I’ll put it to music. I wrote music for three Teddy Lakewood gospel songs. Did you ever hear of him?”
“Ah . . . I’m not sure. . . .”
“He went on to do some stuff in Nashville and wrote that gospel song that Buddy Arnault recorded: ‘The Light behind the Clouds.’ Did you ever hear that one?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Have you got your song words with you?”
“In the truck. I’ll go get them.”
Maudie is not especially happy to see the nice young man leaving. “Is he leaving?”
“He’s just going to his truck,” says Lil.
I wish that preacher would leave, thinks Maudie, and stay gone. He’s too forward, especially for a preacher. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” she says.
“Yes, it is,” says Beatrice. “They’re all beautiful when you don’t have any problems—like Mrs. Osborne. She says she don’t have any problems. Idn’t that what they were talking about?”
“I don’t think she said that,” says Clara. “She’s more dead than I am.” Clara does not fail to appreciate the cleanliness and finality about death—about death done right. Death isn’t wasteful, unless you linger, and then it wastes time. But if you are lucky, it’s a simple poof, and then you don’t waste money and paper towels and water and food for another twenty years. Sometimes she thinks she is the only person left on earth who has a lick of sense about not halfway using things and then throwing them away. Why people don’t have sense enough to hang up and dry out and reuse a paper towel, she cannot for the life of her understand. At the hospital they use everything once and then throw it away, lock, stock, and barrel. At Rosehaven too. Any fool can see that’s wrong. The power belongs to manufacturers and office people and government people all over the globe, fools who don’t have sense enough to use something twice, always busy wasting somebody else’s money, then going home and doing the very same thing, not ever thinking about how much they waste every day. When her stepdaughter took over her household, all good sense about using and reusing went out the window, and Clara does not care to visit that house again in her lifetime. It would be too painful. Her daughter, not her stepdaughter, should have got that house, but her daughter was too proud to take it.
Beatrice brings her hand to her mouth and nose. “Whew. Who pooted? Whew.” She speaks only loud enough for Clara and Maudie to hear.
“First smeller is the feller,” says Clara. “Whoever smelt it dealt it.”
Carl opens the spiral notebook, finds the new song, and hands it to Mr. Flowers, feeling pretty confident that he will like it. “There you go, sir.”
“Call me L. Ray. I ain’t that old.” He holds the notebook far from his eyes, pulls his glasses from his shirt pocket and puts them on, studies the lyrics, touches his hair with his fingertips. “That’s great. Oh, that is just dandy. I’ll get right on it.” He hums a tune, changes it. “Yeah. Sure. No problem. I’ll have something for you in a day or two. Now, do a safety patrol song next. Something funny,
like this one.”
“I was actually in the safety patrol.”
“Who wadn’t, that has any class.”
CARRIE SITS UNDER the mimosa tree at the picnic table, on break. She opens a pack of four-cornered Nabs, concentrates on one before she bites into it. She is trying to forget the image of Mr. Felton’s dry, open mouth.
Latricia joins her, leans her back against the tree, lights a cigarette, and asks, “Why it is Mrs. Talbert won’t let nobody but you wipe her ass?”
“’Cause she like me, I guess. It’s just a phase.”
“Traci says she asking for you all the time. She picky.”
“Naw, it ain’t that. I like her. She’s got some spunk. She ain’t got no sense, but she got some spunk—some left. I think it’s ’cause she rich. She figure she can get whoever she want.” Carrie looks at Latricia.
Latricia’s eyebrows pull up and together. She looks back. “I can tell.”
“Tell what?”
Latricia takes a draw from her cigarette. Blows smoke. “Tell what she thinking. I think she just a mean white woman.”
“I wish I had your body and my mind.”
Latricia drops her cigarette, steps on it, twists her foot. “Huh.”
Carrie pushes another Nab up out of the cellophane and takes a bite, then drinks from her Diet Coke. “You better put that butt in the butt can. Mr. Rhodes’ll be all over you.”
“Mr. Rhodes ain’t gon’ do nothing.”
Carrie thinks of Mr. Rhodes’s big black car, all his businesses. Day-care centers, the Triple A Rent-All on Lawson Street, two hardware stores—one in Summerlin—three convalescent homes. Word is that his wife named them all: Bunny Bear Day Care, Little Rabbit Day Care, some other one, then Triple A Rent-All, Rhodes Hardware, Rhodes General Store, Rosehaven, Garden Rest, and that other one. . . . “What’s that place he own on Gladstone?”
“Brook Arbor Gardens?”
“That’s right. I can’t ever remember it.” Mr. Rhodes has given Carrie jobs at three of his convalescent homes. He likes her because she works hard, she guesses. “Mr. Rhodes, he gets ’em from the cradle to the grave.”
“His daddy had ’em from the cradle to the grave.”
“His daddy never owned all the stuff he own.”
“I think he owned more.”
Two helicopters fly over, one trailing along behind the other.
Latricia yawns, stretches. “Did you know Mrs. Osborne didn’t use to wear no makeup?”
“Naw.”
“That’s what Faye says. Said she didn’t wear no makeup to speak of till she had her stroke.”
ON THE PORCH, sitting in the sturdy seat to her three-wheeled walker so she can get her money’s worth from it, Beatrice watches as Roman, trimming hedges, stops his work, sneezes. “He’s got a problem,” she says.
“He coughs the way my husband used to,” says little Maudie. “He’s been dead over thirty years—thirty-some-odd years. His last job was on the board of trustees.”
The movie starts in Beatrice’s head. “Walter Cronkite gave me four thousand dollars, and that whore-hopping son of mine spent every cent of it in Reno, Nevada.” The movie continues: Mr. Cronkite puts the money package into a big, blue U.S. Postal Service mailbox; a quick jump to her son standing in a doorway handing a fancy woman the first of many installments.
“You shouldn’t talk like that about your own children,” says little Maudie.
“Well, it’s the truth. I have to tell the truth. Everybody does.”
Carl stands and moves to the empty chair between him and L. Ray. Maybe L. Ray will have an idea on the driving problem. “I’ve got to tell Aunt Lil she needs to stop driving,” he says, keeping his voice down.
“What’s holding you up?”
“I don’t know. I keep looking for a good opportunity.”
“It’s hard to lose your independence. My mama, back before she died, up at the driver’s license bureau, couldn’t tell what a stop sign was in the little picture machine. The patrolman or whoever wouldn’t pass her. She got mad because the sign in the machine didn’t have STOP written on it. It was just a shape, you know. She asked him if he’d ever seen a sign without anything written on it. He wouldn’t talk about it and failed her, and then out in the parking lot she told me a friend of hers knew a place over in Burley County where it was easy to get your license, and about two weeks later she told me she’d gotten her license and said she wouldn’t have to worry about it again until she was ninety-seven. Some of these ladies are pretty spunky.”
Yeah, thinks Carl, and you seem to kind of go for them. “Aunt Lil tells me you played a song or two the other night.”
“That’s right. I’m doing a little Thursday-night gig until I get out of here.”
“Mr. Flowers, go get your guitar,” says Mrs. Satter-white, leaning forward in her walker so that it scoots back about a foot.
“You better lock them wheels,” says little Maudie.
“Yes, go get your guitar,” says Aunt Lil.
L. Ray looks down at the magazines in his lap, sets them on the floor, puts his hands on his wheels, and turns to Carl. “Would you by chance go get my guitar?”
“Sure. What room?”
“Hall two. 202. It’s on the bed. Here’s the key.”
In L. Ray’s room, Carl sees a stack of magazines on the floor, the guitar on the bed. He looks at the brand name. Gibson. An old one. With the guitar, he heads back to the porch. He thinks about his guitar lessons, his song notebook, about the little Kay guitar his father bought him from Sears. He should have stuck it out.
Back on the porch, he hands the guitar to L. Ray, and says, “I took some guitar lessons about ten years ago.”
“For how long?”
“Three months. I took three months of trumpet when I was in high school, and then three months of guitar when I got to liking bluegrass. I just can’t stay with it.”
L. Ray looped his guitar strap around his neck. “You should try bass guitar—electric. It’s easy, if you’ve got any ear at all, and I’ll bet you do. Can you sing?”
Carl starts to say no. He doesn’t like his high voice. He’ll sing along with the radio sometimes, though. Sing in the shower. “I sang in the church choir when I was growing up. But that’s it.”
“You sang all those good old hymns—‘What a Friend,’ ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ ‘Just As I Am’?”
“That’s right.” Carl remembers looking at his mother in the choir when the congregation sang “Standing on the Promises,” how it was their favorite song together, how she would smile at him, and how he thought promises was a different way of saying premises, because “standing on the promises” made no sense.
“I’ll bet that’s part of what got you going on country music,” says L. Ray.
“I guess.”
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, here’s one written by Dr. Ralph Stanley.” L. Ray strums a chord, tunes his B string, turns his chair toward the others, and clears his throat. “One called ‘Rank Strangers.’” Then he sings:
I wandered again to my home in the mountains
When he finishes the song, the group applauds. L. Ray sings two more. Then he takes a few minutes—studying Carl’s lyrics on his knee—to work up a verse and chorus chord pattern. He interrupts the ladies: “Attention please.” He strums a chord, then another, hums the first notes of a melody.
Then L. Ray sings the song, and Carl feels so good about it—his and L. Ray’s song—he is almost embarrassed. He wishes Anna had walked out on the porch and listened and then asked, Well, where’d that song come from? He knows it’s a funny song. Mrs. Lowe and Aunt Lil actually laughed. They could make a CD. He wouldn’t need that many more songs. But he doesn’t want to show his excitement too much. Mr. Flowers is a little bit pushy.
Carl stands, and L. Ray holds out the guitar to him. “Would you mind taking this back to my room?”
At the main door, Mrs. Talbert eyes Carl’s shoes as he walks by. Them Indian
moccasin things, she thinks. They ought not be worn to church like that. They ought not ever be worn to church or to a funeral home. Men nowadays had rather shoot the moon than wear a pair of lace-up shoes.
DARLA AVERY ROLLS back inside when the music starts. She remembers the details leading up to the big event that night. They come to her one at a time as she rolls down the hall. It was so embarrassing, so awful.
And oh, was he ever more dressed up that night. Her mama and daddy were okay with him picking her up. Most anything was okay with them. Darla had lied to her mama, told her that L. Ray was in the tenth grade, which of course he would have been if he hadn’t been in shop, because he’d flunked two grades. That man toting L. Ray’s guitar passes her. They both think they are something, making music, when people all around them are dying. Making fun.
Back then, L. Ray had red hair, a kind of dark red, and his eyes had that quickness and he had that thin-lipped mouth that would always break into a big smile at nothing, right when he was looking so hard through those quick eyes.
He brought along a present when he came to pick her up, a brown leather billfold with the flap and snap and change purse and zip-up paper-money holder. It was in a box, wrapped up nice, with a big white bow and green paper. When the doorbell rang and she opened the door, there he stood with that green present.
Okay. Here is her room, 301. She needs to watch her program. It’s probably already started.
AFTER CARL KISSES Aunt Lil on the cheek, L. Ray calls him over. “Listen, I’ve got an electric bass in the shop out behind my Airstream. Would you pick it up, by chance? Anytime.”
“I don’t—”
“My place is easy to find. I can show you a few simple patterns on bass and you’ll be playing before you know it. I need some backup. And by golly, I think you’re the man.”
“I don’t think I’ve got time to learn. I mean, I’d like to, but—”
“I’ll just show you one song—one easy song—so you can say you know how to play bass in case somebody asks you sometime. It’s a fine instrument. A Fender Precision, from back in the sixties.”
Lunch at the Piccadilly Page 4