Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  Alta when he met her was that age, not long out of school, and he was working for Buddy Lewis’s daddy in the tire business and playing music part time in the band they had then, the Hot Licks. Verner Hess wanted to send him to college but Arthur was too hot to make big money in those days. And hell, it was all he could do to get out of high school. Arthur wasn’t the college type. Then Verner Hess wanted him to go into the dimestore business with him but Arthur was too hot for that too, Verner had some idea about him learning the business from the bottom up. It would have been a sure thing. Arthur didn’t want a sure thing. Arthur didn’t want to be in the dimestore business either. He wanted the big bucks and a fast break, he drove a baby-blue Corvette in those days.

  That was when the Hot Licks was going good, too. The Hot Licks was a going concern. They had jobs everyplace, around Booker Creek and over the state line in North Carolina, over in Tennessee. They had as many gigs as they could handle and still hold down a regular job. And girls—girls will just as soon fuck you as look at you, in a band. They used to fuck girls all the time. This was Arthur and Buddy Lewis that Arthur was in his daddy’s tire business with, and Fuzzy Ledbetter who died in Vietnam, and George Lee Wilfong that did go on to make it in a manner of speaking and was in jail in Tennessee the last Arthur heard for income tax evasion. Buddy still has the tire business, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool in Argonne Hills, and looks the other way now when he sees Arthur coming up the street. He thinks Arthur is bad news. It breaks Arthur’s heart. Because there’s nothing as sweet as when you’ve got it right, like that night in the Pearl Tavern or any one of a hundred other nights Arthur could mention when it was just so right, they used to do “Shout” and Buddy would get right down and slobber on the floor. He’d deny it if you asked him today. Now he’s the head of the Heart Fund. They’d do shit like “The Wayward Wind.” Before they were the Hot Licks, they were the Great Pretenders, This Side Up, and the Long Valley Boys. Not in that order. Arthur has forgotten the order.

  The trouble was, they didn’t have a format. First they were country, then they were folk, then they were country again, then they were rock. Folk didn’t last anyway but they should have stuck with country, look where they’d be today. Country is big. Look at Willie Nelson. You can be old and still be big in country. Finally they stuck with rock. The trouble with rock was a serious lack of Negroes. There’s not many of them around Booker Creek anyway, and none of them could play shit at that time. Arthur has often thought since, if they had had a couple of Negroes and a format, they could have made it. Why not? They were hot. They used to wear long hair and pink silk shirts they bought down in Charlotte, North Carolina. Miss Elizabeth used to look at them and cry. She would have died for sure if they’d had a Negro in the band. But more Negroes in town would have been good for her, in Arthur’s opinion. It would have given her somebody to rise above, besides her own family.

  Anyway the Hot Licks had it so right for about eight months there, before Buddy’s daddy made him quit and George Lee went to Nashville and Arthur fell in love. They had their shit together for a while. They used to drink all night long and smoke dope before anybody else even heard of it.

  They were the vanguard.

  Hell, they were just boys then, twenty, twenty-two years old. They’d fuck anything in a skirt. A lot of times this would go on in cars, they’d drive out someplace after the show, park, you’ve got the picture. Hot sweet summer nights. All those pretty girls.

  Sometimes now when he’s in the Piggly Wiggly, say, Arthur will notice some fancy housewife come in there with her linen dress on, or he’ll look real sharp at the gray-haired woman behind the counter, not any older than he is, or he’ll check out the classy lady with the sunglasses and the little tennis outfit, and he’ll wonder, Did we ever do it? Hard to say. He’ll look real close. Cars still get him horny, to this day.

  But he never had Alta until he married her, which is why he did. Not that he minded either. He wouldn’t have done one thing to upset her. Even now after all the hard times and bad shit that have fallen between them, Arthur can think about Alta and cry.

  Now, Alta is a postal inspector in Vero Beach, Florida, searching for cocaine. But you should have seen her then.

  Arthur saw her the first time across a crowded room as they say, noticed her as soon as she came in. The Hot Licks were playing Paul’s Pizza Den over in Clarkston, near the lake. Buddy had quit by then. Alta came in with some girlfriends, two of them, and sat down at the little table in the corner under one of those hanging Tiffany-type lamps, so the light fell right down on her hair. Which was blond and went damn near down to her waist. Shit, Arthur thought.

  He was in the middle of singing “The Twelfth of Never,” he tried to put something special in it.

  Alta was laughing and talking to her girlfriends. Arthur couldn’t catch her eye. They were eating pizza and drinking Coke. It was summer. She wore a pale blue sleeveless dress, a dumb kind of dress really, like you might see for sale in a K-Mart. A prim dumb kind of a dress that buttoned up the front. Arthur loved it. Everybody else in the place had a tan, but Alta’s neck rose up out of her dress like a white column on a mansion, her arms were the purest, palest white you ever saw. Long arms, but real round. She was fiddling with her straw.

  “Look at that,” George Lee said, nodding his head at her while Fuzzy was doing the lead vocal on “Sea Cruise.”

  “Forget it,” Arthur said.

  George Lee grinned at Arthur.

  George Lee knew Arthur was hooked.

  And before he knew it, Alta Wood had him settled down.

  She was the only child of real old parents, Ruby and Forrest Wood. Arthur always thought that was pretty funny, Forrest Wood. Forrest Wood didn’t think so, though. He was the kind of old man who does not have a sense of humor, and writes down everything he’s got stored in the attic. He was real religious, too. Alta’s mother turned out to be a dingbat. At first Arthur liked her, back when she liked him. But then she changed, so Arthur did too. There’s no percentage in it, after a while. Arthur came to his senses and saw her as a dingbat, in the end. At first, when he first started courting Alta, Ruby was taken with him as women generally are and she stayed on his side for a long time after they got married and Forrest turned on him. But then she turned on him too. Forrest Wood and Arthur were somewhat alienated from the word go. But that would have been the case with Forrest Wood and anybody his daughter married, probably.

  Since they didn’t have Alta until they were real old, she was the light of their life. They tried to keep her, too. They had sent her to a Christian academy over in Buncoe, run by a bunch of born-agains. They aimed to keep her pure. Which they did, too. Alta was as pure as the driven snow, it was like she had come from another world. Then when she got out of high school, they got her a job keeping the books for her uncle, who ran a plumbing supply business in Buncoe. This was her Uncle Dink. He put her in a little room in the back of the plumbing supply, where she wouldn’t meet anybody and get distracted. And she probably wouldn’t have, either, except for plumbers and preachers, who Ruby and Forrest approved of and who used to come courting her all the time having seen her in church, if she hadn’t gone out for a pizza with her girlfriend the night in question, the night she met Arthur.

  Alta was young but ready. Alta was ripe for it, as Fuzzy Ledbetter said later and Arthur hit him for it. Now he’s sorry, since Fuzzy died. Arthur was hot-headed in those days. But there is nothing so sweet as a born-again virgin with a certain curiosity. And Arthur loved her. Alta Wood used to wear a blouse with a sailor collar, and red lipstick. She used to giggle. He swore off drinking and then he swore off rock-and-roll. The Hot Licks were breaking up by then, anyway. Their time had come and gone.

  Before Arthur knew it, he’d bought her a ring, and right after that, they got married. In the Woods’ church, of course. Ruby planned the whole thing. Since Miss Elizabeth wasn’t consulted, she got her fee
lings hurt, and she claimed later that she nearly fainted dead away at the extreme tackiness of Arthur and Alta’s wedding. Miss Elizabeth didn’t have anything to do with it except show up, and she damn near didn’t do that, she was so mad. She was also mad because Ruby hired Millard Cline, Nettie’s second husband, to do the flowers. Arthur didn’t give a damn. He only had eyes for Alta, who came down the aisle on Forrest’s arm looking like an angel in her long white dress. Alta had the kind of looks a wedding dress is made for. The ex-Hot Licks stood up with Arthur. Alta’s bridesmaids were her two first cousins from Marion and her friend Johnette Flowers from high school who cried out loud the whole time and tried to steal the show from Alta, everybody said. All born-agains are emotional.

  Right after the wedding, Forrest Wood came up to Arthur outside the church and put his arm around him and said, “You take good care of my baby, you son-of-a-bitch” in his ear. The church itself looked like a gas station, which it used to be. Arthur didn’t give a damn. He took Alta to the Fairystone Motel in Gatlinburg for a honeymoon and it was the finest four days of his life.

  Everything about Alta just killed him. She had a little travel iron she used to iron his shirts. She taped a Kotex across her forehead when she washed her hair, to make her bangs do right. She’d tape them down over the Kotex, with Scotch tape. It turned out that breakfast was her favorite meal. She used to eat two fried eggs. She put bubblebath in the tub. There’s things you can’t know about anybody unless you marry them, or live with them. And Alta would do anything in bed, she loved all that. But whatever they did, Alta would jump right up after it and put her nightgown on in case the motel burned down, she said. She had a long white nightgown, with buttons. Every day of the honeymoon, they rode the Sky-Tram up to the top of the mountain and looked out across three states.

  After that they came back and moved into a little house they’d rented out on the highway, from old man Lewis, and Arthur quit the tire business and went into the A & P where he was the produce man and had more of a chance for advancement. For a while, it was fine. Alta went back to work for her uncle at the plumbing supply so they could save some money back, and get ahead some. She used to cook him dinner every night, real nice little balanced meals she had learned about in home ec, with a green vegetable. Arthur brought the vegetables home from the produce counter. He was a management trainee. It was like playing house, all of it, Arthur can see that now. She was just a girl. They had Verner Hess and Miss Elizabeth over for dinner, and even Miss Elizabeth was impressed. She wrote Alta a note and said she was charmed. But they didn’t see Arthur’s family a lot, except for sometimes Candy, or Nettie and Fay. Alta said the rest of them made her nervous. Anyway they didn’t see anybody much, when they were newlyweds. They used to watch TV after dinner just waiting to go to bed.

  Somehow, this got old. It got old real fast before Arthur was ready for that or had thought what to do if it happened, it just snuck up on him. It was not Alta’s fault. Alta was making curtains by hand and then she was pregnant. Arthur used to lie with his head on her belly and go to sleep, he loved her so much. But somehow in that time he started stopping off for a beer at the Liquid Lunch on his way home, and then for one or two. Then one time he went by the Liquid and Fuzzy was in there with his girlfriend and her cousin from Spartanburg, South Carolina, and he said, “Let’s go over to the dam.” Well, Arthur went. And they were drinking and one thing led to another and in the end, it was after midnight when Arthur got home. He had to hand it to Alta, that night. She was playing it cool. She had not called her mama. She had not been crying either, or if she had, he couldn’t tell it. Which was the first time Arthur got a real notion of how tough she was.

  “I don’t want to know where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing, Arthur,” she said. “That is between you and God. But I have been praying for you.” Then she unbuttoned that nightgown and welcomed him home.

  Then she had Brenda and Arthur had to admit he never thought he’d be as taken with anything as he was with that baby. He wasn’t expecting it. He was worse than a woman about it. He used to get up in the night and look at Brenda, she was the cutest thing he ever saw, he couldn’t believe it. But he was drinking. He got tired of produce and quit. Alta went off to work, and Arthur stayed home with the baby. He didn’t drink then, in the daytime when he was home with Brenda, it was nights that he drank.

  Forrest Wood came over and told Arthur that if he ever heard about him embarrassing his daughter or hurting her feelings, he’d break every bone in his body. But Alta cried—she loved him. She loved him then. And it was like she didn’t care what he did, or how long he stayed gone, if he came home. “As long as you don’t love anybody else but me ever,” she said. She said she was praying for him.

  Arthur worked selling cars with Owens Mooney for a while but it was slow going and Owens was a hard man to get on with, so he quit that too. He wasn’t making enough to pay the baby-sitter. So he stayed home and took care of Brenda while Alta worked.

  Verner Hess came out to see him one afternoon. Arthur was changing Brenda’s diaper when he came in.

  “This is no way for a man to live, Arthur,” said Verner Hess.

  Brenda was grinning and kicking her legs in the air. Over at the plumbing supply, Alta was pregnant again.

  “You’ve got to get a hold on yourself, Arthur,” said Verner Hess. “Your mother is worried sick.”

  “Did she tell you to come over here?” Arthur asked him. He picked Brenda up.

  “No, she didn’t,” said Verner Hess. He sat down on the couch and looked at him. “She don’t say a word about you. You know how she is.”

  Arthur knew all right.

  “But she’s worried, I can tell. And I’ve been worrying too.”

  Arthur sat down in the rocker and looked at Verner Hess. He was a country man, it was hard for him to come right out with whatever it was.

  “Why don’t you come on down and work at the dimestore,” said Verner Hess, looking out the window so he wouldn’t have to look straight at Arthur’s face. “I’m at a point where I could use some good help, I’m getting on up to retirement age, you know. Think about it.” He was a little old stooped-over man, real sweet.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said. Verner Hess was not his own daddy, and he was thinking about that. Arthur wished he was. But he was not, and somehow that had made some difference in his life, he’d be hard put to say just how. Arthur looked for his daddy for years and years and never found him, all he found was a string of women who said they’d known him, years ago. All he got from his daddy was the gun he had as a boy, which Nettie saved for him, and two records he cut in Bristol. They say he cut a third one, too, but Arthur doesn’t have that.

  “Well.” Verner Hess lit a cigarette and smoked it all the way down without saying a thing. “You get a hold on yourself,” he said. “Do you need any money?” and Arthur said, “Yes,” and Verner gave him a folded-over hundred-dollar bill.

  “That offer’s still open,” he said right before he left. Arthur sat there rocking Brenda and watched him walk out and get in his Buick and drive away. It was early April, everything blooming. Alta had planted tulips and daffodils all over the yard.

  Now, Arthur can’t see how it happened. God knows he loved her. He loved those girls. But things went from bad to worse. He sold air conditioners, he worked as a lineman for Appalachian Power. He joined the church and quit drinking, but it didn’t take. He sold insurance. He was a tree surgeon. Alta used to leave him and take the girls, and then come back. They’d make up like crazy. Arthur really loved her, and she loved him. He managed the Holiday Inn for a while. He got drafted, then not. He has a bad heart. Alta moved out, then back. They had a mobile home not far from the One Stop, for a while. In the prettiest little stand of pines. He and Alta used to take a blanket out there at night, in the summer, after the girls were asleep, and listen to the wind through the pines. Sometimes they’d listen
to the radio. Disco was big, then. Saturday-night fever. Alta got softer, sweeter, as time passed.

  Brenda started to nursery school, she used to bring Arthur these pictures of houses she drew, with smoke coming out of the chimney, and things like blue cats in the yard. One time he was gone for three days. Forrest Wood came over and said, “Arthur, I’m either going to kill you, or move to Florida,” and Alta said “Don’t kill him, Daddy,” so Forrest and Ruby moved.

  Then one time Arthur really got into it with some boys, and Verner had to come and bail him out of jail in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a sorry town. He couldn’t remember how he got over there. Verner drove him home.

  “This is your last chance, Arthur,” Alta said. She wore her hair in a pageboy then, right below her ears. She looked so pretty. He could tell by something new in the tone of her voice that she meant it.

  “All right, Alta,” Arthur said. He went to working for Verner Hess, after all those years.

  And he had to hand it to Verner. Verner didn’t even seem surprised when he went over there and went up to the office to ask for the job. “I’d be pleased to have you, Arthur,” was all he said. Arthur started off on the floor, as the assistant manager, and things went along just fine for a while. Arthur liked the job. He was good at it, too. He got Verner to put in an arts-and-crafts section, which went over big. They started carrying a bigger line of ready-to-wear.

  Then they hired Rena Clark. Arthur didn’t hire her, himself. Verner did. She was a little girl from out in the valley with nothing to recommend her. Dressed in jeans just like a boy. Slight, looked almost sickly. Rena Clark couldn’t hold a candle to big, pretty Alta. Rena had frizzy, sandy hair and freckles, thin sandy eyebrows and eyelashes, she was kind of popeyed. Arthur doesn’t know, to this day, how it happened. One day he was showing her the ropes—they started her off in records, tapes, and posters since she was so young—and then the next thing he knew, they were taking off their clothes. This started one Friday night, late, in the coatroom, when they had been taking inventory. Rena Clark was so thin that her shoulder bones showed white beneath her skin, like wings. It was foolish. They used to lock the Ladies and do it in there. Finally they were caught by Lorene Swift, who worked in housewares and called up Alta. “That’s it, Arthur,” Alta said. She packed up and moved to Florida, to live with her folks. Took his girls.