“You know, arsenic is real big in this state,” she tells the officer, but surely he knows this. If he doesn’t, then he doesn’t deserve that badge he’s wearing on that bony chest. “There was the woman on death row back a ways. That was a sad one. A Christian grandmama gone bad. That’s what the newspaper said. Said she was on drugs. And who would have thought? And her coming from such a nice little town, too.” Oh, she has the officer’s attention now. She might even be able to get Ruthie a date with him before it’s all over. Ruthie would say he wasn’t “her cup of tea”; Ruthie would say what she has been saying for years: “But if your backdoor neighbor ever gets a divorce, I’ll be sitting there on his steps. Mmmm, mmmmm, mmmmmm.” Myra is still convinced that that’s why Ruthie has enrolled herself in that fool-fangled smoking clinic. Ruthie wants to rub shoulders with Alicia Jameson and work her way into their lives. Why else would she be there? Myra warned her over and over about that Quee Purdy, about how nobody who was a good decent person would pass any time with her. She told Ruthie that for years people had said she was a W-H-O-R-E; she told Ruthie how Quee Purdy had attacked Myra right there in the Winn-Dixie less than a month ago.
“Are you saying that you think Jones Jameson could have been poisoned?”
“Anything’s possible.” She beckons for him to follow her into the kitchen. It’s kind of exciting leading a man through her house this way. “Then there was another woman not too far from here, did the same thing. Arsenic.” She stops to point out the portfolio of when Ruthie was wanting to be a fashion model way back. “Ruthie has always had big ambitions,” she says, and shows him one of Ruthie in a macramé swimsuit. Myra thinks she looks like a skeleton with her cheeks all sucked in like that. “Isn’t she something else?”
“Absolutely.”
Myra doesn’t tell him that the agency in Raleigh told Ruthie there was more to modeling than looking like a starved refugee, even though Ruthie herself will tell of how her disappointments in life led her to her present vocation of spilling her emotions onto the paper. Ruthie talks so often of spurting and spilling and spewing that Myra sometimes thinks she ought to keep a mop by the door.
“Ruthie’s single, you know.”
“Where did these women get the stuff?”
“Now son, you should be ashamed of yourself.” She shakes her head and pulls out her favorite photo of Ruthie; she’s dressed up to look like a little girl with her hair in braided pigtails and short, short dungarees like that girl with the big bosoms on HeeHaw. Howard loved that show, and Myra used to always tell him that if breasts were something good, then the Lord would have given big ones to more of the good women. He nods and she pulls out one with Ruthie trying to look like Greta Garbo turned backward and looking over that bony shoulder. Bones and More Bones. This might be the man for Ruthie. “Arsenic is so easy,” she says. “Ant killer. Rat killer.” She fans herself with the photos, suddenly feeling quite girly and coy though she can’t for her life say why. “Those women just decided to go for the big pests.”
“Is Jones Jameson a big pest?”
“Oh, no, like I say, he’s a darling boy. He was handsome the day he was born. Now he might drink a bit too much on occasion, and of course his language and those jokes on the radio are just awful, but you know his mama, who I have known my whole life, says that that’s all part of Jones’s image down at the radio station. If he’s to make it big, he HAS to do those things.”
“I see,” the officer turns to write on his little pad. “And what about Mrs. Jameson?”
“What I can gather,” she says, “you know from bits and pieces I’ve heard over the years. Um. How can I say this? I’m afraid I might blush.”
“Please,” he says, “it’s very important.”
“She just wasn’t satisfying him. And we all know what happens when a man is not satisfied.”
“What?”
“Like you don’t know, a big fella such as yourself!” She snatches the photos and puts them in the envelope. It’s coming back, the anger, like a great big dark wave breaking over her head.
ROBERT FOLLOWS MYRA Carter into her kitchen for coffee and a snack before he wraps up the questioning. There is a joke around town that people who go to visit Myra Carter sometimes disappear, that she talks them to death. The paramedics who came when her husband died said that they were wanting to die, too, before they could get out of there. Alicia once defended this very issue; she called it “the widow syndrome.” She called it loneliness; her work with lonely widows is what got her hooked up with Quee Purdy in the first place, though people around town will quickly tell you that “lonely” and “widow” are two words that do NOT fit Ms. Quee Purdy.
“You know, they live practically in my backyard,” Myra says and points to the window over her sink where she has all kinds of knick-knacks: little Dutch children kissing and a bird that bobs his head into a glass of water, a little tiny wooden outhouse that holds toothpicks. “From the window you can see the deck and their family room. Get to the far end of my garden in the new potatoes and you can see their bedroom.”
Robert gets up and follows her lead. He leans close to the window and, sure enough, he can see the back of Alicia’s house. He can see the deck where he was once invited to a cookout where he was way out of place and out of style. Alicia was hoping Robert would enjoy meeting some people since he had just moved to town. Maybe that was her way of letting him know she had a life that didn’t include him, that they could be friends but nothing else. Before the night was over, right there on that deck, Jones Jameson announced that he had knocked up Alicia. She was sitting beside Robert, and he saw her jerk to attention.
“See? You want let’s walk outside?” Myra pushes herself out of her chair. Her hair is a brassy strawberry blond, like somebody used the wrong bottle of solution when she went in for a rinse. “I’ll give you the tour. Besides,” and her voice gets high and squeaky, “Mr. Sharpy has to wee-wee.” The dog waddles over to her, his rolls wiggling in excitement. “A weedle-wee for Mr. Sharpy.”
Robert hesitates as he stands there in the afternoon sunlight, looking out over Mrs. Carter’s backyard. As boring as it is listening to this woman talk, he is oddly comforted by her surroundings, soothed by the smell of pine paneling and oilcloth, coffee and toast. The little junk bits she’s collected over the years. Robert has already learned not to comment on anything; there’s a whole long story behind whatever it is. It will begin with something like: Well, my Howard had just returned from the War. . . . Everything began when Howard returned. What on earth will Robert use to measure his life? Has it already happened? Was it when he took to croissants and foreign flicks?
He follows her outside. It’s so hot, like being wrapped in a thick heavy blanket, his eyes blinded by the brightness. She makes a funny clicking sound, and Sharpy waddles right beside her, lifting his leg on a fence post as she opens the garden gate and leads Robert in. The smell of the garden is overwhelming, rich with newly spread manure and the acrid odor of tomatoes and marigolds. The garden is perfectly manicured, not a weed to be found and, Myra boasts, she does NOT use weedblock, as do all of her young careless neighbors who might think they “garden.” One compliment and now Robert is getting the full garden spiel, how she uses tin cans to protect her tomato plants’ roots, and how she orders her topsoil from down near the river, where there’s lots of decay and the soil is slightly acidic.
“I have a load coming the end of this week,” she says. “I like to really feed my plot of earth every fall.”
“Now where are the potatoes?” Robert asks, straining to see into Alicia’s backyard where Taylor has a plastic log cabin. It makes his chest swell and ache to see that little house. There’s something about kids living in a shitty household that tears him up. He imagines Alicia trying; he sees her out there putting that house together, lifting and connecting the pieces while that lousy bastard husband was probably inside jacking off to some magazine or a picture of himself. Robert flushes with his own thoughts;
he is ashamed when he uses bad language and yet, so often there’s no other way to do justice to an idea.
“The far end.” She gives the dog a look like “Is he stupid or what?” and then shoos Robert on down the path. “Now walk around the hills, please, there you go.” She waves one hand as if presenting the back of Alicia’s house, the deck, and yes, a window, the shade drawn.
“Oh, well,” she says. “Late one afternoon, dusk really, I was out here working and I saw them having an awful fight. You know dusk is the best time of day to see in.”
“Do you know what it was about?”
“Well, he didn’t want her working, which I can’t blame him seeing as where she works.” Myra pats her thigh for Mr. Sharpy to come back to her. “I’ve had several run-ins with that awful Queen Mary Stutts Purdy, myself. She can call herself Pur DAY all she wants, but she is nothing but a Stutts and folks around here know that.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“The argument.”
“Hmmm now, let’s see if I can remember.” She looks at her watch and tells him she’s going to have to think it all through again, that she has got a thousand things to do today and so he best be on his way. “I know. Why don’t you come back tomorrow, and I will have remembered by then.”
“All right.” Robert takes one last look at the back of the house, the rubber ball, the plastic wading pool, Alicia’s bathing suit hanging over the railing of the deck. He would give anything to talk to Alicia right now, just to see her, but she had specifically asked that they not bother her until there is new news.
“I do hope Jones isn’t dead.” Myra hands him a little brown paper bag full of cherry tomatoes and dirty cucumbers that smell of pesticides and hustles him back through her dark house. She stands in the doorway, her television (she flipped it on in passing) now blaring in the background. It’s time for Oprah Winfrey. “You better check the river,” Myra says. “Especially now that you’ve found that old fancy car like what my brother-in-law drove to the Tastee Freez. Check it for prints. Do your duty, young man. Did I even tell you what my brother-in-law did buy?” She calls out to his back, “One of those Gremlins. Can you believe that? A Gremlin. He’s a gremlin. When you come back I’ll tell you why.”
Testing . . . yoo-hoo. Day four and I just don’t know how long I’m gonna last here in the twilight zone. I mean, this radio guy I told you about? Not the one staying here who tries to flash his fat ass at you if you’ll let him. HE spent his whole therapy time talking about how he knew he was capable of having some extramarital activity, it was just that he hadn’t found anybody who was worth him risking all that he has. Quee told me later that what he has is a wife who tells him exactly what to do when. Quee says she’s all for a powerful woman all right, but she has no respect for the man who doesn’t give her a good fight. Man oh man, I wish you could see Quee’s face when she gets going on something. It’s like her whole face quivers, like all that loose skin starts trembling with a life of its own. She clenches her teeth and flares her nostrils and, other than that, all of her emotional reaction is there in the skin, especially the skin around her neck. She said the other day that somebody could snip away what was there under her chin and fashion two rather sizeable breasts.
“I’ll take ’em,” Alicia said though as far as I can tell that is the one and only thing that she does have, and Lordy she’s another story, which is exactly what I’m building up to. She is downright pitiful. If the greased-up addicted radio guy is (to quote Quee, of course, because I have never made a habit of using the “p” word and certainly not the “c” word—only the “f” word) “pussy-whipped,” then it’s for sure that this Alicia is pecker- (a “p” word I do find myself using quite often) whipped. She looks like somebody who ought to be walking around with her mouth hanging open. You might name her Pitiful Pearl or Sorrowful Sue if she was a baby doll. I’m into such names right now because part of my made-up therapy is to have folks look at a baby doll and then name it. It’s kind of a modernized Rorschach. I mean, do they see sadness or joy, loneliness or horniness, as suggested by Mr. Radio Lard-Ass. I try to pick babies whose expressions are not so obvious. Then I pull out the hard part of the test. I hold up a stuffed animal and I say: “What gender is this?” Quee kind of liked this one because she herself is also somebody who has always been able to know the sex of a stuffed animal. It’s just instinct; it’s the same way that I’m very good at knowing someone’s sexual preference, like when I was set up on a blind date with a man I knew would much rather be with the man friend who set us up. My date, of course, didn’t know that yet, and neither did the friend who set us up, but I did. It was like being struck in the head with a car jack; that’s what Quee’s forever saying, Struck in the head with a car jack—sometimes she says, Well, hit me with a concrete slab, the same way my ex always said, Wow, I could’ve had a V-8. He is so original, somebody should give him a prize. That’s what I’d always say to him. I’d say, Yuk, yuk, that’s about as funny as Elvis singing “What’s eatin you, Babe” on a leprosy ward. That’s so funny, when Columbus told it to the Indians, they shot him. Well, I knew those two men were in need of two men, and you might as well say four divided by two and just stick those that are left together, which is what I did, and they are living happily ever after to this day, still amazed that I knew they were gay before they did.
I mean, it was like I was saying earlier, you know about how I just have intuition about things, which is why people come from all over for my expert advice. Come out, come out wherever you are. Shit or get off the pot. Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Life is a terminal thing.
Anyway, you would see Alicia and you would say that she had been beaten to a pulp emotionally. She thinks she’s ugly, and she thinks the world is ugly. The only thing she seems to think is cute is that old handyman Tom, always hanging around here, and who wouldn’t, I ask you. Still I’m trying to talk myself out of thinking so, because for one reason he doesn’t even live in a house! Besides, it seems he’s all moonie over somebody who fell into a coma, a married woman who fell into a coma I might add. AND, Quee seems to think that if he ever gets over her that he might come to ask Alicia out. Another married one! Quee said all this about how men find Alicia so much fun to be with. There’s Tom Lowe, who always stops after building a closet or some other big brain-requiring feat to ask how she’s doing and to play with that child of hers who looks too old for diapers if you ask me, and then of course there’s that tall skinny cop who looks like he might be in the poultry family with that Adam’s apple of his and those white, white, almost gooseflesh-looking arms. He’s the kind of man you might see and then say, “Did I see a ghost? Is your name Caspar?” You would NOT want to see this man in swimwear.
I won’t be surprised if I swing around and DO see a ghost one of these days, what with all these awful-looking people that are long dead staring out of their dusty old frames. As far as I can tell right now, the only thing that Alicia and I agree on is that these old photos give us the creeps. Alicia seems to think that some bad karma might get out, but Quee just laughs and says, “Oh, honey, you’d know bad karma if you felt it. But I was in real estate long enough to know that it doesn’t happen very often.” Now how can you let her tell that little bit and then stop? I mean, there that child of Alicia’s was hanging on to her and smelling like a polecat, and Alicia was wanting to hear a story. So of course I asked if she’d ever encountered “bad” karma (worse than what I’m feeling right now, I wanted to say but of course didn’t). She said that once she was trying to sell a house that’s known as the murder-suicide house, and that yes, when she went in and there was still the smell of death, blood in the shower stall and brains on the light fixture, that there was some bad karma. Alicia was looking like she might vomit with this part of the story and excused herself to go change that old diaper where there’s a diaper pail that keeps the whole back of the house smelling like something died and went to hell. “But a little steam
cleaning and Clorox, fresh paint, and all the bad karma disappeared.”
“Or was covered up,” I said and she just smiled, her skin quivering, and that’s when she said that about she could take what’s on her neck and make somebody some boobs, that is if she believed in boobs. She said that she was starting to think that women should have them removed as soon as their childbirthing days are over; get rid of all those cancer caves, she said. Alicia gasped when she heard this. Some people shy off from that word cancer, like the word itself might bite you. I suspect they probably had somebody in their childhood tell them that if they had ever eaten or touched a crab (also known as Cancer in the zodiac) that they would die from that very disease. A boy in third grade told me that but of course I was too smart to believe him; I did however tell him that he had ancestors and that his epidermis was showing and that everybody knew he had slumbered in his sleep, and he cried to the teacher, who spanked my hand with a ruler and never once asked me why I felt the need to say all of that to him.
So Quee says, these men just take to Alicia “like a fly to honey.” Now if Alicia has a pea in her head, she knows that Quee is just trying to build up her ego. I mean, her husband is missing. Gone for days. Not a trace, except that car of his that if I was Alicia I’d’ve gone and claimed and be driving. “It’s impounded,” she said to me slowly, like I might not have all of my chromosomes. “They are thinking there might be foul play.” Her husband was probably bored to tears like me and just had no choice but to pack a bag and run like hell. So, anyway, there I was with Mr. Radio in the therapy room, and he’s saying all this about how he might have his fat self an affair if he finds the right person, and there Alicia, who’s sitting there rubbing out his hairy-monkey-looking feet, thinks he’s making a play at her. She said: “Really, Barry,” which was the first time I’d heard him called anything other than the Radio Guy. She said, “Really, Barry, why don’t you just go home and do something nice for Wanda?” Alicia glanced at me as if to say, “Why don’t you shut up with your little dream interpretation and let me take care of things.” I waved her on. Fine, fine as wine. I am not going to beat my brains out in this little job. I mean, it is like the handyman said, I do have a choice about being here.
Carolina Moon Page 14