by Lee Smith
After a while it got him real nervous, looking at the church, and thinking what all was going on in there, and frankly he was hot as hell too. His car didn’t have any air. So he thought, Well, I’ll go out to the One Stop, and see what Clinus and them are doing, so he did. The first thing he noticed was Clinus’s billboard, which said REST IN PEACE. Clinus never missed a trick, even if he never hardly set foot away from the One Stop. Candy said Dr. Don said Clinus has got that disease where you won’t leave home. But they call everything a disease these days. What Arthur’s got is nerves and despair.
Roy Looney was out in front pumping gas for Mrs. Brown who used to teach third grade. Since her husband died, she’s been spending all his money, she’s got a new black Buick Regal. Roy gave Arthur a big wave and a big grin, he looked like a Texaco ad. Happy motoring! He was a nice kid, though, like Nettie said he’s got him a scholarship to East Tennessee State. Roy has good prospects and high hopes. “Hello, Mr. Hess!” Roy said. Mrs. Brown had small black beady eyes.
“Well, I’m so surprised to see you’re not at your own mother’s funeral, Arthur,” she said.
“Well, Mrs. Brown, fuck it,” Arthur said. Then he could hear her hollering behind him as he climbed up the One Stop steps. He could hear Roy talking real smooth to her, trying to calm her down. Arthur didn’t give a damn, either. The world is too full of sorrow and real despair to worry over ex-third-grade teachers who are mean as a snake. Arthur felt bad enough as it was. He would have been at the funeral, he would have been right there in the front row, if he could have. “Clinus?” he yelled. No Clinus. He got a beer from the cooler and went on back.
It takes a while to adjust your eyes to Fay. She keeps it so dark in there. It’s like walking into the movies when the movie’s already going. And then once you can see, you’ll wish you couldn’t—the way Fay has gained weight in these last years, she has put it on equal all over. She looks like the Pillsbury dough girl. You can’t see her eyes over the top of her puffy cheeks. Her wrists pooch down over her hands now, those ankles as big as a child’s waist, she keeps both feet stretched flat out in front of her on this round orange stool. Wears white bobby socks and shiny gold house shoes. It’s hard to see a thing like that.
Arthur kept looking, though. Something was different and he was damned if he could figure out what it was. Fay was mumbling, kind of, and shifting inside her dress. This was a flowered dress which looked like it was made out of a curtain, probably it was. She’d had it on for about a month. She kept switching the channels around on her little box, and mumbling. So she was agitated all right, but that wasn’t it. That wasn’t what was different.
Then it struck him.
Fay was wearing a hat.
It was a green felt hat like a turban, with a feather on the side. Naturally, it looked terrible.
“Clinus!” he hollered, and Clinus said, “Come on back.” Clinus was in the kitchen.
“Where’d she get the hat?”
“Had it, I reckon.” Clinus was wearing an apron, standing by the stove. “She’s got a whole closetful of stuff, if she’d wear it. Some of it not bad.”
Arthur sat down in the chair. Clinus’s apron, which had net ruffles on it, used to belong to Miss Elizabeth.
“You look real cute,” Arthur said.
Dress-up day at the One Stop.
Clinus grinned. Clinus never says much, which might be why you talk to him. Sometimes Arthur will catch himself going on and on. Everybody does. It’s like since you know he’s retarded, it doesn’t matter what you say, the way you might spill it all to somebody you happen to sit next to on a bus, because you know you’ll never see them again. That’s how it is with Clinus, too. It’s like you’re not really telling anybody but he pays you just enough mind to where you will go on talking. Doesn’t say much back, though. Clinus just looks at you while you’re talking. He’s got eyes like the eyes of animals in kids’ books. Bright blue and completely round. Hair like Harpo Marx, and wears a hat. He was wearing a Red Sox cap that afternoon. He was mixing stuff up in a bowl. Arthur got himself another beer out of the refrigerator and started to talk. Arthur told him all about what Sybill had said at the hospital and about that attractive woman, Mrs. Palucci. He was sure Clinus had already heard about Sybill and what she was saying, but Clinus never let on if he had or hadn’t. He just stared. Arthur told him all about having a nosebleed the night before and about Mother leaving the envelopes in the safety deposit box. Clinus was mixing cornmeal and buttermilk together in a yellow striped bowl. He looked down and measured some soda and sugar. Arthur went on talking. Clinus looked right at him, mixing with a big wooden spoon. You can’t ever tell if he’s taking it in, or not. But you think he is.
“What the hell are you making?” Arthur finally asked.
Clinus grinned. “Hushpuppies.”
Now that beat all, making hushpuppies in the middle of the afternoon. It’s a zoo out there at the One Stop. No use asking him why he’s making them, either, you know why—because he wants to. Because he’s got a taste for them right now. All right. Arthur started feeling better. He got himself another beer and watched Clinus get out Nettie’s heavy old black iron skillet and pour in the grease. His little net ruffles swishing, it was comical. Mother used to wear that apron in front of company. Arthur could hear Fay out in the other room, over the TV, it sounded like she said “Unh-unh.”
“Seems like Fay is up to something,” he said to Clinus. “What’s going on?”
Clinus said, “Beats me.” He put a little dab of batter down in the grease, to test it, and it spattered, so he put in more. He threw those dabs down in the grease like an expert. All these years Arthur has known Clinus, he’s never shown a sign of making hushpuppies. Maybe he only feels like it when it’s a hundred degrees in the shade and there’s a funeral going on.
“Trip,” Clinus looked up from his frying and said. “She thinks she’s taking a trip.”
Arthur realized he meant Fay. Well, why not, why shouldn’t she take a notion as well as the rest of us? Probably thought she was going to the funeral, since Nettie went.
“Done it before,” Clinus said. Now this was saying a lot, for him.
Arthur said, “I tell you what gets to me more than Sybill if you want to know, it’s Candy fixing Mother up, you know what I mean?”
Clinus was turning the hushpuppies over in the pan. His eyes were like round blue marbles.
Arthur said, “I mean fixing up her own mother that way. It’s not right, it’s not natural. But it don’t seem to bother nobody else, Candy included.”
Clinus said, “It ain’t her mother.”
“What?” Arthur had been drinking but he thought he heard Clinus right.
Clinus laid paper towels up and down the counter, for his hushpuppies. “Candy’s a love child,” he said. “I thought you knew.”
“What are you talking about?” Arthur stood up and grabbed Clinus by the ruffles but he just ducked his head and grinned, and wouldn’t say anything else. He was through talking. He had said more than Arthur ever heard him say before, and maybe more than he meant to. What the hell did Clinus know about a love child, anyway? A love child! You can’t tell what Clinus knows. He might be crazy, or he might be crazy like a fox. You can’t tell. Clinus wouldn’t say anything else.
Then the kitchen door slammed shut and in came Roy. He stood there looking at them. I guess we look like we’re nuts, Arthur thought, or else like we’re dancing. Two grown men, dancing. Alta used to love to slow dance. Her favorite tune was “Mister Blue.” Arthur let go of Clinus and sat back down. Roy was sweating and looking real puzzled at Arthur.
“I wish you hadn’t of done that, Mr. Hess,” he said all respectful and reproachful. He meant old Mrs. Brown. He’s going places, that kid, you can tell.
“I wish I hadn’t of too,” Arthur told him, “but son, it’s too late now.”
Roy st
ood there sweating and looking at them. Clinus started taking the hushpuppies out with a spatula, one by one, laying them out on the paper towels. “Get you a beer there, Roy,” Arthur said, “and pull up a chair.” So Roy did, and Clinus threw some more dabs of batter into the pan, and they laid into the ones that were done, and that turned out to be some of the best eating Arthur ever did. Clinus puts a little bit of onion in them, that’s the trick. It was nice in Nettie’s kitchen, too. It was hot as hell outside, but in Nettie’s kitchen it was cool, with the air conditioner going, and the grease sizzling, and Clinus cooking, and Roy and Arthur and Clinus eating the hushpuppies as fast as they came up out of the pan.
My dad said it one time and like every other faggy thing he ever said it’s kind of true, which is why he pisses me off so bad. He said, “Son, you don’t appreciate things. You don’t know how good you’ve got it. How soft it is.” Then he punched me in the stomach to show he’s a good guy after all, he’s one of the boys. It hurt. He’s not one of the boys. I’m not either, I guess, whatever that means. Mom used to say Why don’t you have some friends over to play, honey? Get that, to play. She wants me to ask her friend Mary’s little asshole son over here, the one that wears the Izods all the time. Izod everything, all those faggy little lizards. I bet his underwear is Izod underwear, probably they’ve got Izod toilet paper in every faggy bathroom in their big faggy house. Another time she said, Honey, why don’t you have a party? I could just see it, she’d put all these glasses out just alike, she’d have them on some kind of tray.
But what I was saying is, Dad was right. It used to be bad around here, okay, but now it’s the pits. It got so bad right before the funeral I almost said, “Hey, Mom, I think I will have a party,” just to blow her right out of the water. She’s sweet, though, Mom. Aunt Sybill’s the bitch, or I thought she was until this thing that happened yesterday. The thing is, you don’t ever know. You just don’t ever fucking know.
So okay it got real zooey around here after Grandmother died. Everybody’s all upset and crying, and Aunt Sybill comes up with all this shit and they’re trying to shut her up. They don’t want anybody to know, right? Big deal. Somebody in the tennis club might find out. Lucy Hillsborough’s faggy son might find out and then he wouldn’t want to play.
Mom says to me, “Oh of course there’s nothing to it all but don’t you tell a soul, I don’t want one word of this to ever get out of this house,” and Dad says, “Well now, first things first. We’ll settle the estate and then we’ll solve this little mystery. It may not be such a bad thing after all, to look into it, for all of you to get these feelings out in the open and come to terms with them. Growth is painful.”
Dad said this to Mom and Aunt Sybill the morning after the funeral, in the kitchen, while he was putting on his ankle weights to go running. Mom sat at the kitchen table and cried. Aunt Sybill stood in the middle of everything hugging herself and shivering like it was winter instead of probably the hottest damn day of the year which later it turned out to be. “Well I just had these headaches,” she said. “It was unbearable. Surely you see my point.” Now all this is happening in the morning, right? So I just got up and I come in the kitchen for some orange juice and what do you know? Mom’s crying, Sybill’s crying, Dad’s putting on his ankle weights all dressed up in a little white outfit, the king of clean. “Where’s breakfast?” I say. Mom starts crying harder, and Dad says, “Son, can’t you fix yourself some cereal at least? Is that too much to ask?” “Just fuck it,” I tell them all. “See you later,” and I leave. “Son, get back in here,” Dad is yelling. “I’ll be back in a little while,” I yell back. “I’m just going out for a while,” and grab my bike which is right outside the door, and I’m gone. Gone. I can hear Dad back there yelling. Adiós to the zoo.
It’s nice, a morning like that, all the grass has still got dew on it so it looks like these little jewels, all shiny, but the sun is hot already and it smells real nice, strong and sweet and funky. I ride all over the place. I went miles, and since I didn’t get any breakfast, I started feeling, I don’t know, kind of rare or something, like I was having a mystical experience. It was like, while I was riding my bike, I was watching myself ride my bike, up and down those streets, past all those houses. All over Argonne Hills. Blue shutters, green shutters, picture windows, old houses with lots of little panes. I know who lives in most of them. Who the hell knows whatever goes on inside? I rode downtown and saw Candy in her shop there, doing hair. I stopped and she gave me a Coke free out of her machine. Then I rode up on Grandmother’s hill but nobody was awake in her house yet, you could tell Kate was still asleep. Kate’s flaky, she’s cool, Lacy’s cool too, for a grownup. The thing about Mom and Dad is, they act so super-grown-up all the time, they’re always so sure about everything. Even when they’re fucked up, they act like that. You can’t ever tell what’s happening.
I got off my bike up there and sat under a tree by the side of the house for a while and once I thought I saw my dad, running along down at the other end of Main Street. I could barely see him. Somebody was running. I had to put my hand up to my eyes to see him at all, even then I wasn’t sure. All that green and then the street and then a flash of white. In the summer sometimes you can’t be sure, it all starts to wave in the sun. Heat rises, you learn that in school. I sat on the hill waiting for Kate to get up but she didn’t, and then I got to thinking about Grandmother and about that kind of chocolate cake she used to make, that had mayonnaise in it, and then I got to thinking about how she used to cut things out of paper for me when I was little. She could take a plain old piece of paper and make a bird, a little man, a hat, a boat. Sometimes after it rained I’d go up there and get her to make me a bunch of little boats and then I’d sail them down the creek that ran off down the hill then, after a rain. Grandmother had blue hands. She used to take a piece of paper and fold it, and fold it, and fold it some more, and then she’d cut out a little boy, and then she’d call me and say, “Here, Sean, take his hand.” So I’d hold one of the little boy’s hands and she’d hold the other and move back, sort of, and all of a sudden we’d have ten little boys, all holding hands. This kind of made me cry, thinking about it, on the hill at her house that morning.
But then also she used to correct what I said all the time, and tell Mom about my manners. Fuck manners. But then it was like I could see a whole line of pale little boys all holding hands and running down the long green hill through the rising heat. I thought I’d better go downtown and get a doughnut, Mr. Fowler at the Rexall will usually spring for one. It felt like my bike was wobbling, I wasn’t feeling so good by then.
So I go in the Rexall, and I’m getting this doughnut, which is when old Aunt Sybill shows up. She saw me before I saw her, I would of left if I’d seen her first. Sybill looks all funny and her skin is pulled too tight across her face. She’s buying some kind of pills. She gets the little bag, and pays Mr. Fowler, and I’m kind of hiding out by the video machines so she won’t see me, over behind the cosmetics, but she sees me anyway. I act like I’m playing Ms. Pac-Man.
“Why, Sean!” Sybill says, like we’re at some kind of faggy tea, like she hadn’t just been crying in my mom’s kitchen two hours before.
“Yes, ma’am.” Everybody in there is looking at me now, including John Greenwood’s sister who’s in high school, with the big tits. She’s over by the makeup, looking at me.
“Here . . . here . . . ” Crazy Aunt Sybill goes fishing in her purse then and comes up with some quarters. Which she starts trying to give me, and I start trying to back off, only there’s no place to go. “Don’t you want to play some games?” Aunt Sybill has a big shrill voice like that woman on “The Jeffersons.”
“No, ma’am, not right now,” I tell her.
“Here—” she keeps saying, “here.” Then I catch on that she really wants to give me something, anything, it’s like a real big deal with her and I’ll never get out of there if I don’t do it, so I do it,
I take the quarters and put one of them in Universe Zero, which lights up of course, so I start playing it. Sybill stays right beside me. She won’t go away. She keeps trying to make conversation, you can tell, and I’m playing this game called Universe Zero. This is a game where you do okay if you come in from the left all the time and get the red asteroids first. Aunt Sybill is holding the back of my T-shirt saying stupid things. She says “What does that mean?” when I go into the second stage and the screen turns yellow. Then she says, “How do you know which one you are?” and I say, “What?” and she repeats it, with kind of a catch in her throat. “How do you know which one you are?” she wants to know, which is so stupid I can’t stand to answer so I just act like I can’t hear her, over the sound of the game. I’m the one in the green starship. I move through the second stage and the third stage, I destroy the goblins and the giant mind behind the moon. I move through stars in the Nether World, I get zapped finally by a goonybird in from the right, what the hell. One hundred eighteen thousand isn’t bad, at least it doesn’t suck or anything, and when I turned back around, crazy Aunt Sybill was gone.
Now here’s the thing I meant when I said you don’t ever know, because what I felt like then was real weird. I felt sad, kind of, about Aunt Sybill, like she might not be so much of a bitch after all, for some reason having to do with how much she wanted to give me something and the way she kept asking me things. Aunt Sybill never had any kids and she won’t either, you can tell. The best she’ll ever get is a mercy fuck, I thought, but that made me feel mean, and real sad. I don’t want to be like them but I don’t want to be like anybody else either. I put the other quarter in and when the game starts I’m so hot I’m awesome. I move through all the stages like it was nothing, the screen goes blue, and yellow, and green, and blue again. I destroy the goblins and the mind behind the moon and this dude I’ve never even gotten far enough to see before, man, who comes out in the ninth stage. I move through space and time. The screen goes purple, red. I’m the one in the green starship, making tracks. I fly alone through Stellar Space. One hundred forty-eight thousand, finally. I get to put my initials, SBD, in the machine. The B stands for Bird, my grandmother’s maiden name. One hundred forty-eight thousand. SBD. It was awesome.