by Lee Martin
Bill let a few seconds go by, and then he said in a flat worn-out voice, “R.T., I think I’ve been looking for something like this ever since I got out of the Army.” In the months to come, he’d go on in letters that came first from the county jail and then Vandalia Prison about how he’d gotten out of Vietnam, but he hadn’t been able to let loose of the rage that filled him. If it hadn’t been Harold Timms, he wrote, it would’ve been someone else. I was just pissed off, R.T. I wanted someone to have to pay for something. I guess that’s the best I can put it.
That Sunday, I watched my mother reach out her hand to Connie as if she were about to touch her face. The she said, “Honey, can I come inside?”
Connie had on cutoffs with frayed threads dangling down her legs and a white T-shirt. She had cotton balls between her toes. She’d been painting her toenails a bright red, and it made me wonder how she imagined her life being the next day and the next one after that—if she was thinking that she was glad to be rid of me so she could have a boyfriend she wouldn’t have to sneak around to see. However she saw her life unfolding, it wasn’t the life my mother was there to give her.
“It’s about your daddy,” my mother said, and then she stepped inside the house, and I couldn’t hear anymore.
I couldn’t watch that silent house and the little shaded porch with the wooden swing bolted to the ceiling. So many nights, I’d seen Connie in that swing and heard her singing to herself. All the love songs that were popular then: “Let’s Stay Together,” “Precious and Few,” “Puppy Love.” She was a girl without a mother, and I was a boy who felt abandoned, so it was easy for us to love each other.
Soon the sheriff’s car pulled into my driveway, and I heard Bill say, “Well, I guess this is it.”
I went to the other window of my bedroom, the one that looked out over the front yard, and I saw my father and Bill get up from where they were sitting and walk across the grass to meet the sheriff, a tall, lumbering man with a dark moustache.
“I’m going to have to take you in,” I heard the sheriff say to Bill. “I’ve got deputies headed down to that oil lease road.”
“I’m ready,” said Bill.
And like that he got into the backseat of the sheriff’s car, and then it was just my father and me and my mother and Connie, whom we’d watch over until her grandparents could arrive from Indianapolis.
“Go over and sit with Connie,” my mother told me when she came back to our house. “I want to talk to your father.”
What they said to each other when they were alone, I don’t know. I only know that later that night he packed a bag and got into his Galaxie and drove off to find a motel in Phillipsport until he could locate a more satisfactory arrangement.
“It’s going to just be the two of us,” my mother said. She put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Just you and me, Roger. Can you believe that?”
I couldn’t believe anything then, and I knew she couldn’t either. It was that sort of day, a day that felt like it should belong to someone else, the way so much of my life would seem from that point on. It would be a long, long time before I’d let myself trust anyone who said they loved me.
That night, I couldn’t say I loved my mother, or Bill, or my father, who had gone without saying a word to me. I could only say that I felt sorry for them—sorry for all the trouble they’d found—and I felt sorry for Connie, who didn’t deserve to be on the other side of that trouble. It would be a while before I’d be able to say that I didn’t deserve it either.
“You’ve always been nice to me,” Connie said to me that evening when we sat on her bed, waiting for her grandparents.
She wasn’t crying. She was sitting with her legs crossed under her, rocking back and forth, and she let me put my arm around her waist, and then she laid her head over on my shoulder, and we sat there for the longest time, not saying a word.
The Philco radio sat on the table by her bed, but we didn’t turn it on. She had a bulletin board on the wall above her desk, and from where we sat I could see it was covered with things I’d never known had meant that much to her—a wrapper from a Hershey bar I’d bought for her once when we were out and she was hungry, a book of matches we’d used to light a candle on our blanket at my grandparents’ farm, the plastic rings from the candy pacifiers we liked. Just little things like that. Nothing that mattered at all, but they did to her, and now, given what was about to happen, they did to me, too.
“They won’t let me live here anymore,” she said.
I told her Indianapolis was only three hours away. “Not far at all,” I said.
“Not too far,” she said.
The sun was going down and the light in the room was fading. Through the window I could see lights coming on in the houses down the street. We sat there in the twilight, not saying a word. She let me hold her, and I smelled the strawberry shampoo in her hair and the fresh nail polish on her toes, and there was nothing really we could say because we were in a world now that wasn’t ours. It was run by people like my parents and her grandparents and Bill, who sat in jail waiting for what would come to him.
“You’ll come see me?” she finally said.
I told her I would.
“I won’t forget you.” She tilted her head and kissed my cheek. Then she settled her head back on my shoulder and I felt her eyelashes brush my neck. “And I won’t blame you for any of this. Never. Not ever.”
Then we sat there, and after a while, we lay down side by side. She turned her face to the wall, and I slipped my arm around her and fit my legs up against hers. She let herself cry a little then, and I told her everything would be all right. I’m not sure I believed it, but soon she stopped crying and then she said, “I wish we were the only people in the world right now.”
“I wish that, too,” I told her, and it was true. I did.
We stayed like that a good, long while. Maybe we even drifted off to sleep. Then headlights swept across the wall, and we heard a car door slam shut outside and frantic steps on the porch and her grandmother’s voice calling, “Connie, oh Connie, oh my precious girl.”
“Shh,” Connie said. “Don’t move.”
And we had that instant longer—that instant alone—at the end of a story that was never meant to be ours.
She was in my arms and then she wasn’t. Her grandmother was there, and I let her go. Connie Timms.
I walked out of her house and stood on the porch. I looked across the way to my own house, where a single light was on, and I saw my mother’s shadow move across the closed drapes. I thought how strange it was that I lived in that house, how strange it was that my uncle had killed a man and my mother and father, as I would soon learn, were at an end.
Connie’s grandfather, a short man with a big chest and blue sport coat, came up the steps.
“Who are you?” he said.
“No one,” I told him.
“Young man, I asked you who you are.”
I just shook my head, already moving down the steps. There was too much to say, and I didn’t know how to say it.
“Come back here,” he said. But I kept moving. I still think I should have had a choice, but I was sixteen. What else could I do? I went home.
THE DEAD IN PARADISE
IT STARTED WHEN THE TREE FELL. MAIZY SAID THAT WAS THE FIRST sign: that big old linden tree, that heart tree she claimed was the reminder of steadfast love, just toppling over, stretching out across our backyard like it’d had enough of standing there, nearly ninety feet tall, and wanted nothing more than a good long rest.
Then the Mister Peanut Barbeque on East Main burned down—the very place we’d first met and tossed our hearts into a tangle, and Maizy worried there’d be a sign following—a third omen—and that we should be on the lookout.
“Maybe someone’s not living right,” she said, and she lifted her eyebrows, making it plain that she thought I was suspect.
I won’t deny she had call. It’d been a winter of snow and ice and frost on the heartstrings. We’d b
een married over thirty years—there we were, on the other side of mystery and surprise—and back in December I’d made the mistake of saying one night to Maizy, “You know, hon. You could have done better than me,” and she’d said, “Nah, Baby. I did the best I could.”
I woke up the next morning stewing about what she’d meant, and I aimed to ask her straight out, but before I could, she stuck her finger up in my face, and she said, “You’re guilty of something. That’s why you said what you did last night. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect sooner or later I’ll find out.”
Had I been untrue? I most certainly had not, and, another thing, I had nothing to do with that linden tree falling. I want that in the record. The trunk just hollowed out and couldn’t stand the weight of all those limbs.
Anyway, when I said that bit about Maizy being able to do better than me, I meant it, and if I was guilty of anything it was only lack—or greed, depending on how you choose to study my situation. The fact was, on those long winter nights when the sun went down by five and there wasn’t much to do but prowl the house and get all rotten and wheezy inside my skin, I got to thinking of everything Maizy deserved that I’d never been able to give her. Let’s get this out in the open: I’ve always been a man willing to piss away my last dollar on a chance. Said plain: I’ve done things I’d be ashamed to admit, made bonehead moves that my sweet Maizy suffered, all for the sake of some memory of love.
“I remember that first night you walked into the Mister Peanut,” she said one day. “I took one look and thought, good god, help me. I’m going to marry that man.”
Sometimes that winter, when she was gone to her mama’s or just out at the IGA to do the groceries, I’d get down the wedding album and look at the pictures and I’d try my best to remember who we were back then: Maizy still in high school and working nights at the Mister Peanut, and me—gap-toothed, goofy-grinning me—scrawny as shit but drawing a steady wage hauling anhydrous ammonia for United Prairie Farm Supply. Like most people setting out, we were blind to what was ahead of us; we couldn’t have seen that winter coming even if we’d tried. So I’d get all soft in the heart looking at those wedding pictures: Maizy in that dress her mama sewed, the one with the empire waist and the double-layered sleeves, so the wedding announcement clipped from the Daily Mail said, and me in a cream-colored polyester suit my daddy gave me the money to buy. “Don’t let yourself go to fat,” he told me, “and maybe Maizy can use that suit when she has to put you in the ground.” That was my daddy, ignorant to the ways of romance. If he’d still been breathing, I’m sure he would’ve been ashamed to know I sat there those winter nights, tears coming to my eyes, because that boy and girl in those pictures seemed familiar to me, but so far away I couldn’t touch them or know them to call them by name.
Then I fell in with Doogie Roy.
“Oh, Baby,” Maizy said. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Business, hon,” I told her. “That’s all it is.”
“Keep it to yourself. Whatever it is you’re scheming. I don’t want to hear a word about it. Your daddy was right. You’re going to end up in prison or dead, one of the two.”
Here’s the truth: when you spend your life short on cash, you keep looking for any chance at all to get on the long end of prosperity. I’d already fallen sucker to a pyramid scheme, tossed away money on lottery tickets, invested unwisely in oil wells—not to mention, as eventually I know I’ll have to, my most grievous sin, the one I can’t yet bring myself to say.
One night at the Mister Peanut, Doogie Roy said, “Baby James. I’ve got a proposition.”
Folks like Doogie started calling me Baby James a long way back in high school when I looked like a young James Taylor, the Sweet Baby James of “Fire and Rain” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” and even now, when my hair’s thinning, I still carry the resemblance. “How about it?” Doogie said. He turned a chair around backward and straddled it. “My man, let’s talk.”
He had a tattoo on his forearm: a neatly printed list that said 3 QTS. MILK, YOGURT, LESTOIL.
It was the last part that got me—Lestoil. Less toil, I thought, and though it seems funny to say it now, I believe that was the first sign, and not that linden tree like Maizy supposed. Less toil. I felt it rise up in me like a plea, and I realized, then, the truth that Maizy and I had been spending the winter trying to avoid: our time together had started to feel like work.
“What’s on your mind?” I said to Doogie.
He crossed his arms on top of the chair back and nestled his chin down on his hands. He had gray eyes, clear with just a tinge of blue. Icy eyes, I suppose some might have said, but to me, at that moment, they were the color of everything I’d ever come close to, everything I’d never had. They were almost pretty, those eyes. He winked at me. “Ammonia,” he said.
In high school, he was an all-conference quarterback—Lord, he could heave that ball—but since then? He was almost fifty years old, and here he was washing dishes at the Mister Peanut. Let’s just say he’d had his troubles. A few stints up at the penitentiary in Vandalia—nickel and dime stuff, stealing cars, assault and battery—but now he was into the dope.
“Ammonia?” I said to him.
He grinned. “Anhydrous, my man.” Then he broke it down into syllables, his voice a whisper. “An-hy-drous. You know what I’m talking about, Baby. Don’t let on like you don’t. That’s what all the crank heads need to make the go-juice. Crystal meth, Baby. You know the score.”
Our part of the country is filthy with methamphetamine. Word had it that Doogie had gone mobile. Sometimes he cooked meth in a rental unit out at the U-Store, sometimes on a john boat on Borah Lake, sometimes after hours in the kitchen at the Mister Peanut. He’d never said as much to me, but that was the story around town. He knew I hauled anhydrous, so I always figured it would only be a matter of time before he came asking. Once he did, I felt that old itch: money to be had, a door to open, a new and marvelous life.
I could have said no. I’m aware of that. It could have been that easy. But you don’t know the whole story yet. You don’t know about Doogie Roy and a certain night in 1982 and a talking bird named Coco Joe and the words we say to the dead in paradise.
“All right,” I said to Doogie. “How much?”
It’s amazing, the turns a life can take. You might see me and Maizy now in the IGA, the Walmart, or the Toot-n-Totem, and never have a clue that once upon a time we were Daddy and Mama to a sweetheart little girl. April Renee, that was her name. We had her six years, and then she left us. Tumors in her brain. Medulloblastoma. That’s the fact of it, but the whole story? How in God’s name does anyone ever tell it all? How do I tell you about the trips to St. Jude’s in Memphis and the checks that came in the mail—money from people who knew us and sometimes from total strangers who’d heard about our trouble and wanted to do what they could to help? How do I say, without risking that you’ll turn a stone ear to me forever, that I cashed those checks and gambled the money—threw it away at riverboat casinos all along the Mississippi—all while April was dying?
That’s the hardest part for me to say, that I did that, and here’s the truth, ugly as it is: sometimes it tears me up more to remember that part than to call to mind the day April died.
On that day—February 14, 1982—we were, for just a few minutes, blessed, and it was all the doing of Doogie Roy.
Doogie had this mynah bird, Coco Joe, and he’d taught it to hop up on April’s shoulder and say, “Are you my little buddy?” That was enough to make April think Doogie hung the moon—that bird and the way it’d lean over and take a peanut out of her hand. “Little buddy,” Coco Joe would say. “My little buddy.”Then he’d fly up and sit right on top of April’s head. That was Coco Joe.
On the last day April was with us, Doogie came into her room at St. Jude’s—he’d driven six hours to get there, the first half of it through an ice storm—and slung over his shoulder was an old gym bag. You guessed it. He’d used that bag to smuggle in C
oco Joe.
I like to think it mattered, somehow it made a difference, even though by this time April was barely with us. She was there in the bed, covered over with the tubes and whatnot, her little bald head—all her pretty blond hair gone to fuzz—too small for the pillow. You wouldn’t have known to look at her that not more than a year ago she’d been mascot for the high school cheerleading team, cute and feisty with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her skirt and sweater that Maizy had sewn and those little red and white pom-poms we’d special-ordered just for her. After a basketball game, she’d yabber about how she wanted to go see Doogie and her little buddy, Coco Joe, and I’d drop by his trailer in Goosenibble, no matter that it was getting late and time for April to be in bed. “Just this once,” I’d always say, convincing Maizy it was all right. That was the way life was for us then. We thought we owned it.
That day at St. Jude’s, Doogie’s hands were shaking. Imagine it: this big old red-headed boy, mitts like potatoes, trembling as he reached into that gym bag and brought out Coco Joe. They looked at us—I swear the bird did, too—waiting for the go-ahead.
We let him. What was the harm? He set that bird down on April’s pillow, and Coco Joe bowed his head. He rubbed against her face. For what seemed like the longest time, he kept nuzzling her. Then he said, “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” just like April had taught him one Saturday morning when she was watching cartoons, and if that was the last thing she heard before she slipped off to heaven, I’m not ashamed to say I take comfort from it, or that to me Doogie Roy will always be a good-hearted man, no matter the wrong turns he’s taken—a better man than me more than likely, even though Maizy said she couldn’t look at him after that day without feeling her heart tear. The night the linden tree fell she dreamed about April, who was up in the tree with Coco Joe—the two of them sitting on a limb, all those heart-shaped leaves around them and those white flowers that always filled our yard with their sweet perfume—and what April said to Maizy was, Are you my little buddy?