“I think you’re wrong.”
“Well, ask him.”
“I reckon I will. Ross. Ross, how was it that….”
MEREDITH
Everybody insisted the baby be named Meredith Ross Jr., and they’re calling him Little Meredith, which ain’t good by no stretch of the imagination. I call him Ross because that’s what I can pronounce, most of the time. Some of the others are starting to call him Ross, too.
Rhonda’s gone. For good, I guess.
Me and Ross and Noralee are still living with Mama and Papa. Noralee’s learning a lot about babies. She’s doing a good job except when she sulks.
Ross is a pistol. Looks just like me except he’s got ten fingers and ten toes. He was born November the second. In October, Rhonda probably didn’t say over fifteen words to me. Everybody said she was just having a hard time with the last part of the pregnancy. I typed out, “What’s The Matter?” so many times I started typing out WTM and she’d just look at it and shrug her shoulders, and cry sometimes. I more or less knew what was the matter, but felt like there was some chance I might be wrong and I wanted her to talk about it, but I was getting more worked up the closer it came to baby time, and more worried, and more wondering what the hell she was going to do, and if she was going to leave before the baby was born, or after the baby was born. It was not a easy time, with me trying to learn to talk and button my shirt. And I kept remembering closer and closer up to the time when the mine exploded. We were coming into a village and Hux asked me if the road had been sweeped and I said it had. There was a curve in the road ahead and I saw a mangy dog on the side of the road, sitting like he was about dead. I remember seeing the curve in the road ahead, but I don’t remember any blast or anything. I keep being afraid I’m going to remember it.
Mark got home three days before we left for the Christmas trip to Florida, and then he had a few days with us in Florida before he had to report back to Homestead Air Force Base in Miami. Things are going good for old Mark. He’s through with the war, but he’s staying in the Air Force, got him a Corvette and four or five girlfriends. Stewardesses, nurses.
I had some things I wanted to ask him and had them typed out for days before he got home. When I get to reconstructing a day or a time or an event I forget the name of something or some fact. I had forgotten the name on the tombstone we dropped down the well that time, but Mark couldn’t remember it either.
We’d been up under the house dropping Mason jars down there and bombing them with rocks when we decided to put something live down there to rescue, so we stole a chicken from Mr. Gibbs’s backyard—this was before Rhonda had tits —but in the meantime we found out that Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs had a damn tombstone, a headstone thing with just the name and date, for a damn BACK DOORSTEP They were really pretty low class. You’ve got to be pretty low class to have a tombstone for your back doorstep.
By that time Aunt Esther had stopped Mark from going over there except when we snuck over there, but what happened was we got more interested in dropping that tombstone doorstep down the well than in dropping the chicken down there. Somehow we figured the chicken might not work.
Or maybe we did drop that chicken down there.
Anyway, we got over there and stole that tombstone and rolled it home in the wheelbarrow—it was real heavy—and slid it up under the kitchen, leaving this swath which we brushed over like Uncle Hawk does the jeep tracks, and we propped it on the well curb like a cigarette on the edge of a ashtray and had this little ceremony where I said a speech where—
We must not have dropped that chicken down the well because I would have remembered that for sure.
Anyway, I said a speech where at the end I said this guy’s name and “may he rest in peace,” and that was one hell of a splash—drops of water came all the way out the top of the well.
Mark remembered that. He looked good. He’d lost a little weight, had all his arms and legs, said he’d been running three miles a day, playing handball. He’s been out West at some kind of radar school before he starts learning to fly the F-4. He had two stewardesses and a nurse visit him out there. That’s all he could talk about. Mark likes to talk about his women. That and the F-4. He was pretty comfortable around me. I mean he didn’t give me any of this I’m-proud-of-you-and-you’re-a-real-inspiration bullshit. It’s damn terrible the way the human race don’t know how to act around somebody that ain’t the average talking Joe. Let something be a little off and people get turned on to this different frequency and they act like total assholes and don’t even know it. I figured it out pretty much: Thousands of years ago they had to kill people that was screwed up, so now some of that instinct is still in the blood, and people feel guilty that they want to kill you, so they act funny.
Anyway, Mark answered some questions and talked until he ran out of things to say and didn’t come back over until the morning we started out to Florida on the Christmas trip.
All the way down I knew something was bad wrong when Rhonda looked out the car window more than she looked at Ross and cried as much as he did. Mama was telling me, before Rhonda had Ross, that pregnancy affects some women that way. Then she was telling me that the first few months after the birth would be that way.
Well, what happened in Florida was that Rhonda knew these guys playing music in Key West—some of her old band—and she wanted to go down and sing, she said. She told me this on the night after the Silver Springs trip, which we always take on the second day we’re there.
Rhonda and me were staying in the garage guest room because the baby would wake everybody up inside. Aunt Sybil and Uncle Hawk hadn’t realized when they fixed that room up for us that there won’t no way Rhonda could take care of Ross and me, so Mama said she’d come out and stay with us, and Rhonda got mad as hell. Then Mama sent Noralee out there to help, and Rhonda got madder, so there was me and Rhonda and Ross in that little garage guest room the first and second night in Florida, trying to pass time.
When she told me she was leaving, she stood with her face to the wall and said, “Some of the band is in Key West playing music and I’m going to catch the bus down there tomorrow and sing with them tomorrow night… maybe the next night or two.”
Aunt Sybil and Uncle Hawk had this crib set up in the corner and Ross was on his first shift of sleep. There was this little black-and-white TV out there, a little refrigerator, and we’d already eaten and watched TV over in the main house, and then we’re out here in this room with her having just said that, and it was like feeling something fixing to explode, blow up. She was leaving me even though she chose me for better or worse, sickness or goddamned health, and I decided that I wasn’t going to sit there and let her walk out on me without saying something, doing something—she was doing this to ME, leaving me alone and I hadn’t done a goddamned thing. I got blowed out of the water in ‘Nam. I won’t about to sit there again and get blowed out of the water without doing anything. Here was somebody leaving her child and piece of a husband.
She was standing with her back to me.
I hit the wheelchair arm with my stump and stuck out my tongue as far as I could. She didn’t turn around. I hit the chair again and again and again, harder and harder and harder, with my tongue out as far as I could get it—the working half of my face as ugly as I could make it. I was hitting it so hard the chair was rolling backward on the left, about a inch every hit, turning me away from her. I kept my face toward her with my tongue out while the chair turned the little bit on each hit. My rolled-up sleeve came loose and hung down. She finally turned around, ran over to me and grabbed my shoulders and screamed in my face, “Stop it! Stop it! You goddamn piece-of-nothing. Stop it!”
I kept my tongue out as far as it would go. She was goddamned free to go. I was glad of it—but not without her hearing from me first. She went over and started unpacking my suitcase which she hadn’t done the night before. She put my clothes in the two bottom drawers to the dresser. She didn’t hang anything in the closet and she didn’t f
old anything up. She just threw it all in there, mixed up. She didn’t sort the underwear or socks or anything.
Hell, if I could have, I would have left, right then—with Ross.
Then she turned out the lights and there won’t nothing but the light from the TV I’m sitting in the wheelchair, glad for once that I couldn’t talk because it was all a great dark cloud and I couldn’t do nothing with words. My neck was hot. All I wanted to say was “Do what you have to do. Good riddance.”
“I got to do it, Meredith. Esther, and Mildred, and Noralee, and Bliss can take care of Ross. That’s all they do anyway. It’s just one big happy family that cooks, and talks about dead people, and don’t never ask anybody else about their family, and if you don’t have a family, or if you have a shitty one, you feel like shit. And I’m having real problems taking care of a two-month-old baby and a invalid war veteran. I want to sing some music, Meredith. Anybody would. I just want to sing some music. I’m entitled to it. Goddamn, you birth a baby and then put up with five or six in-law mamas and I don’t know what all else. I just want to sing a little music with a band. That’s where my life is. And it’s all disappeared.”
She sat down on the bed. I watched her face—a dim white color from the TV light, while her eyes looked down at her hands. I heard her voice over and over in my head saying that about invalid war veteran and then I made it say, in my head, how she used to tell me she loved me. Because Rhonda has this gravelly voice that sometimes whispers when she don’t mean for it to, it’s so rough. And I figured right then like I been figuring since I got back from ‘Nam that if I wanted to hear it I would have to bring it up in my mind along with the other things I’d been bringing up. So I brought it up just to listen to it for a little while, while she sat on the bed and pouted and cried.
I didn’t cry. I was pretty numb. I just sat there for a long time.
The next morning—the hunting morning—it was hot and raining. Dan Braddock came in the store and talked about this real estate company he was starting—wanted Thatcher to start a branch in North Carolina. He kept telling me I still had my mind, I still had my mind. I typed out: NO I DONT. YOU DONT EITHER.
I remembered how cold it had been the last Christmas I’d been there, when Bliss came out on the back steps and sat with me. So since nobody could go hunting because of the rain, we sat around in the store. Rhonda called to find out when the bus came through, Noralee and Bliss took turns with Ross, and I sat there behind my eyes, watching, the whole time Rhonda was walking out there and getting on the bus, carrying her green overnight bag. Good looking ass. It was a sad state of things to watch—that bus pulling away, but it was sad because of all that had gone on before the war. As far as after the war was concerned, she hadn’t took to mothering real well—I don’t think she ever had any example. Me and the baby was far more than she could handle. There were too many women around anyway, it seemed like to her. And rock and roll was calling. Way down in Louisiana close to New Orleans. She could sing the hell out of that song.
MARK
Bliss says somebody needs to follow Rhonda down there and talk to her one on one, and find out for sure if she is planning to come back—ever. Rhonda said she was going to stay just one night, but Bliss isn’t sure, and says that if Rhonda doesn’t come back, we might never again know what she is planning to do, and that they all need to know in order to figure out how to take care of Meredith and Ross when they get back to Listre.
Mother says she wants to go along with me which I know will not work because Rhonda’s going to be singing in a night-club and all that, and Mother goes to bed at nine-thirty anyway, so I try to explain all this before I leave and she finally says she won’t go. She said she just wanted some free time to talk to me.
It’s a long six hours from Locklear to Key West. I’ve driven down to Key West twice since I’ve been stationed in Florida. They have a celebration at sunset every night on a dock which faces west into the ocean. The party breaks up after the sun goes down. It’s a wild, good-feeling time. I figure I can get a room, catch the sunset act, then find Rhonda wherever she’s singing. There’re not that many places with live music.
I get a room and am driving to catch the sunset when I see Rhonda walking toward the dock with two guys. They must be band members—they’re wearing jackets with “The Rockets” on the back. I pull over to a fire hydrant and call out to her.
She looks at the wrong car, then sees me and walks over. Her eyes are red. Rhonda is very, very good looking. Part of it is the way she carries herself, the way she stands with one hip forward. She’s blond. Then there’s the milky quality of her skin, with some kind of bronze undertone or something, and she has a deep, husky voice that’s straight from the movies. And she’s one hell of a singer. I don’t blame her, in a way, for wanting to sing.
I need to know where I can talk to her tonight and all that, maybe eat breakfast with her tomorrow before heading back—after she’s had time to calm down and think about what she wants to do. And if she wants a ride back, then she can ride back with me.
“What the hell are you doing down here?” she asks. “You following me?”
“No. I just came to give you a ride back, maybe. They were all worried about you, you know, and I volunteered to drive down here. I been down here a couple of times. Nice place.”
“They ain’t worried about me. They’re worried about Meredith and Ross. You know that. Man, it was like I was tied in a straight jacket. I can’t—” She starts crying.
“Why don’t you get in and I’ll take you wherever you’re going, unless you’re with those guys.”
“I ain’t with those guys. They’re just in the band. We had a great gig last night—at Sloppy Joe’s.”
She waves bye to the guys waiting, walks around the car and gets in. Her hair is pulled up on top of her head and these little ringlets hang down on the sides. She gets in and pulls out a joint. “You ever smoked one of these?”
“Yeah.” I don’t tell her only one.
I start thinking, and I try to stop thinking what I am thinking, but I figure I’ll just wait and see how things go. Rhonda’s been stuck in a very bad situation for several months, actually over a year. And she’s a sensuous woman. And we’re both in Key West alone, and if she says she’s not going back, I’ll call Bliss, and if Rhonda really needs me in a bad way, then what the hell am I supposed to do? It’s all a matter of physical geography. I mean, if I’m thinking it, and she’s thinking it, that’s the sin, as they say. Why the hell deprive yourself, and in this case, nobody gets hurt. That’s the real situation. Nobody is getting hurt. That’s more obvious than anything.
MEREDITH
Bliss went into the guest room the afternoon that Rhonda left and hung up my clothes and made up the bed and straightened things out. Ross stayed in the house with Mama that night. Thatcher rolled me out to the guest room and helped me get in bed. At different times, different people put me to bed, and if Old Blue flops out of my underwear when it’s Bliss’s turn, she says, “We’re all family.”
Ross was doing good. It’s not hard for him to be kept clean and happy when Noralee, Mama, Aunt Esther, and Bliss are all looking after him. They put him in my lap for a good bit of the time and he smiles at me. I get Bliss to hang a rattle from my stump—safety-pin it to my sleeve—and I can play with him as good as anybody, especially if I’m on the floor.
At about nine o’clock on the second night, Mark called Bliss from Key West. I was in my spot at the end of the counter in the store when she took the call down at the other end. They talked for all of a minute and Bliss says to me, “Come on, let me roll you out to the guest house.”
On the way over we met Thatcher. He stopped and stood while Bliss rolled me toward him.
“Sorry, Meredith,” he said. “I was on the phone line. But maybe it’ll be a little more relaxed without her around.”
Sure, Thatcher.
When Bliss rolled me into the guest room I thought about killing myself som
ehow, but when she turned on the light, I saw Ross’s striped T-shirt on the bed—and Bliss had her hand on the back of my neck—and I knew it won’t no more than a thought.
She walked over and sat down on the bed. “Rhonda’s not coming back.”
I nodded.
Bliss talked about how everybody would help, that she was sure I could come live with her and Thatcher if I wanted to, that when I learned to walk and got the arm I’m supposed to get, things would get better. She didn’t know I was just getting lower and lower. I felt like I was at the bottom of the barrel, end of my rope, end of the line. I didn’t even have the energy to hold my mouth closed. I nodded toward the bed.
She rolled me over to the bed, clicked out the brace, stood me up in the walker, took off my coat, unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it off, unbuckled my belt, unzipped my pants and when she started pulling them down over my hips I got a hard-on. She moved the walker, held my arm, pulled back the covers, helped me sit on the bed and then lie down. She covered me up, turned me over to face the wall, walked over to the door, turned out the light, stood there a minute, then left. In a few seconds she came back in, closed the door, locked it. She took off her coat—I could hear her, my good ear was up—and got into bed behind me. She was wearing a silk-feeling blouse. She put her top arm under mine, her hand on my chest and squeezed. God, oh God, I needed it. I needed that. She massaged my chest, then my stomach, then the back of my head with her other hand; then she worked my shorts down. It was a little cumbersome. I was ready to come if she touched me, I knew. She got her other hand under my waist and found me with both her hands at the same time and began to move them first very, very slowly…. It was like heaven.
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