“We gonna stop here,” he told Solemn.
Solemn was absorbed in a listing of presidents seemed just updated to “Bush,” on “Cleveland, Grover,” now, since she had seen the Cleveland County sign awhile back, saying it was home to him. Redvine swerved around to reach his briefcase in the backseat. He set it in his lap. He chugged the last of the tepid coffee in his thermos. He reached into his shirt pocket for ammunition against poor breath or weak voice—a Halls. Solemn got the radio to hurdle over the usual country and western into 103.9, urban contemporary. Redvine pointed to the stack of properties kitty-corner to the Malibu.
“I’ll be here,” he said to her. “Stay in the car. Or come to that door.”
Solemn looked across to an entrance with three frosted floral panels and a gold emblem door knocker. In a place where there was scarcely a need for anyone but the postman to see a number to know the address, she took the door as her reference. Redvine exited the Malibu and opened the back door. He gathered the display models Solemn had already run through. It was a toll on his recently aching shoulders, even when he alternated sides, if he remembered.
* * *
A few songs later I noticed I ain’t seen my daddy. He ain’t motioned me inside to meet nobody who care to meet me. He ain’t come back to the car. He wasn’t kept standin out on the porch. He was inside the house still. There. A porch light shined in the afternoon. The sprinklers went haywire. It was hot. I wanted to walk in the water.
This pebble path massaged my feet. I felt ’em, but rocks couldn’t cut me. I carried my flip-flops in my hand. A barefoot woman I was. I could smell the berry pie, felt the fresh-watered grass, heard somebody laughin, saw the paper on the porch. It was next to roses. I knew rosebushes was nearly impossible here, Mama said. Maybe, since somebody live here succeeded, Daddy found a customer who was tough-talkin him. Them ones always held him up. They didn’t ever buy shit though. I pressed my ear to the door. I ain’t hear nothin. I rang the bell. Some pretty chimes. I stood there for what seem like a long time, had my ear against this frosted door. I ain’t hear nothin. Finally I grabbed hold of the warm sweaty knob to let myself in.
This first room was more than what I had imagined could be there. The wooden floor was dark and light and medium planks. A shiny black cat—no, telephone it was—sat at the door. It had its whole own table with a cushioned chair pushed into it, like the kids table at Thanksgiving. A Bell South phone book was in a cubby under the table. What I first heard like this cluckin at me, like from a teacher or old woman’s tongue, turned out to be a grandfather clock. I ain’t never seen one of those. I eased forward on the floor like it was a frozen lake, first ’cause I had no idea if it might creak and next to scoot out in secret if I needed to. Past the foyer was a parlor with huge patterned couches. A table large as my bed rested in the middle. Another table was a chess game with pieces laid out underneath on a glass step, teacups rested on top. I sized it all up: this leather photo album with a clear openin on the cover, for the yellow picture of a couple drowned in a wedding gown fit for two brides, a book of Mississippi swamps, paper called The Bolivar Commercial and Time and Life magazines just like my mama keep.
“Daddy?”
I wondered if it was a furniture set outside. Mmmmmmmmmmm … lemonade or iced tea and biscuit cookies come with that. In the next part, a piano sat black in a corner. A parrot cage. The birds was green and blue, part pink and yellow in some spots. Not even one wing flap to let nobody know they was here. Painted pictures of off-yellow and cream faces decorated the walls—dark wood framed, faces jut out, lookin like they had some complex messages. Boys and girls mostly. A few women. One man. The back door shined. I thought it was a light tunnel in back of the house. Yeah, I got a little mad, walkin through the cut slant in the kitchen, with every one of the dozens of porcelain cups and hundred stacked glass plates and handy teapots and tiny cauldrons and glass carafes stored behind small glass doorways. Who the fuck get to live in a dollhouse?
* * *
Redvine had walked up to the house same as Solemn. No one answered. He rang the bell, a couple times. He never would have otherwise, but he tried the knob. It was loose. He stepped in. Maybe this was the type of place where there were servants, a maid or an assistant. Someone to answer the door. So he had walked in and stood, half-expecting anybody who was home would sense a stranger in midst. And that stranger, a black man, would be something to shout out against. But he was a salesman. He had a daughter and even a business card with him. And he would claim he had come to look for her. He—didn’t know why—grabbed a pair of R-monogrammed cream ladies’ gloves dangled on a coatrack hook; tiny and dainty they were. He had always taken pride in being a small man, and the women had always loved his small hands. The women had loved more about him, too. He could have been even less faithful than he had ever been.
Earl Redvine had no idea how he would explain himself were he caught walking up crouching and moaning stairs, just to check. Instinct guided him to that as well. But again, no one. Just more of the same. The room doors upstairs all open. Beds made. Rugs pulled. Closets closed. The neckties and necklaces dangled from the corner of a mirror in one room. An inkhorn alone on the hallway secretary. A bathroom punctuated the middle of the mouthful of a hallway Redvine walked down. A clawfoot tub centered the room. The bathroom sparkled. Not a speck of soap or toothpaste on the oblong vanity mirror. A linen shower curtain hung from a few rungs, without a wrinkle in it. A stack of magazines rested on a small table near the bronze tissue paper holder. A vase, dried nettle and sage.
Redvine called, “Hello?” All he saw was all he did not have and maybe never would—the hole in the doughnut. There was a final consolation in it. Being his age. He had a son in the military. He had a daughter-in-law. He had grandchildren. He had a daughter, unruly but not without hope of being broken into respectable conformity. He had a beautiful wife who remained faithful in her ways with him and optimistic about all he attempted. He had indiscretions undiscovered and covered up, by another man and a well no longer used, fittingly. And the roof over his head had no payments under it. It was his. He owned it. He had accomplished much.
But he cried.
He cried for secrets he put on his daughter and a missing woman he did not really know. He cried his son and daughter never fell down steps the minute they learned to walk. Actually, they never had steps to fall down. He cried his son was married at a one-room church and his daughter could not marry in a cathedral. He cried someone was allowed to have bi-level and tri-level homes with barns and coach houses and lawns and pet dogs whose coats shone as if they had been waxed. He cried he never went to college or the military or anywhere else would get him beyond a few states around Mississippi. He cried, so much so he did not even see his daughter appear on the top floor of the house.
She caught him in the master bedroom. She had thought about it. A lot.
She giggled some when she spoke: “You know, we could just take they stuff.”
Redvine snapped out of it, came back. He focused on Solemn, so much taller and like her mama she had gotten, without him being able to pay bills, let alone attention.
“Yeah,” he kind of told her and himself. “I guess we can.”
* * *
Redvine stuffed rings and necklaces and broaches in his pocket. He moved frantically. But Solemn, who made him do it, did not. “Go back and empty those things out the boxes and bring ’em here … now!” he shouted. “Should be four or five boxes.”
Solemn’s footsteps down the stairs and across the wooden floor sounded hollow. She heard the parrots chirping. But no, it was not a father or a mother or a son or a neighbor come through the back door to catch her and her father inside of this home, rummaging. Solemn shot out of the door. Once in sunlight, she looked across the yards. Folks were inside, locked and holed up. Perhaps eating lunch. In all the time she had ridden with her father, they had never come upon a house with the doors unlocked.
Solemn opened the door of the
driver side to remove the key from the ignition. She went to the back of the Malibu and slid the key into the trunk’s keyhole. The click sounded louder than ever. But there was still no one around. No cars on the road. No neighbors in the yards. It was quiet and peaceful. She lifted the lids off the tops of the DigiCate boxes and tossed the heavy machines into the trunk. She perspired under her arms and between her legs. Sweat dripped down from everywhere, it seemed. She resolved to go inside the house and use some of the soap she had seen in the bathroom: French Milled engraved atop it. She wiped her face as the sweat tickled it, so to not wet pretty soap. She took a last sweep of the avenue before she stacked four boxes into one another. Then she walked back to the house and let herself in like she really lived there.
By this time, Redvine was downstairs with a neat pile of jewelry at the door. The pile was a gleaming high tangle of wristwatches, stopwatches, necklaces, lockets, rings, bracelets, cameos, and cuff links amidst a shiny miscellany.
“Throw all that in there,” Redvine told Solemn. Then, he grabbed a box and hustled to the back of the house. Solemn grabbed a few handfuls from the pile. She heard a crash. She caught Redvine smashing the doors from an imposing cabinet of ammunition and guns. He used a fireplace poker. Like somebody Solemn had never seen, Redvine tore into the cabinet and threw stuff in a box. He looked up only to tell Solemn he needed a new box. She followed him into the kitchen. A man there in back of the kitchen, broad bellied and white, stern. Ready to lock our hands in little round chains. Hah. He only a stretched-out apron hung down from a nail, his coat strings tied behind.
And so it went. Father and daughter tore through a house in Cleveland, Mississippi, on a quiet afternoon when the Richards Family (as engravings on the jewelry introduced them) had decided to take advantage of the nice day to go to the Ellis Theater for a show. An impromptu trip, bluegrass music along the way, the usual seats. Everyone knew them. “Ain’t no crime round here.” Traveling salesmen came and went; Girl Scouts showed up with cookies; neighbors received neighbors’ packages to set on doorsteps.
From the house, Solemn and Redvine collected jewelry and artillery and silver and china. They ransacked a breakfront and desk drawers. They snatched down unopened bottles of aged whiskey and bourbon and scotch. They piled up silk scarves and wrapped kitchen crystal inside them. They found loose fifty- and hundred-dollar bills and Susan B. Anthony dollars and Indian buffalo nickels. There was a coin collection. He uncovered a set of gold pens—To Thomas Richards, for 30 years of dedicated service to Bolivar County. He threw them in, jinxed and mad he had ever thought he could be a good enough salesman to buy some of his own. He found a laundry bag in a dumbwaiter behind the kitchen. He dumped out the rank linen and towels to find a few empty pillowcases. Heavy cotton. There was little way to walk outside with two vintage phonographs, one small television and one boom box he found without some potential notice or injury to their finer parts. He spared them. He gave the pillowcases to Solemn to carry out. He watched her carry them across the lawn, straining and losing her balance. If her plans were intercepted, she had already imagined a role: she would be the babysitter, or the cleaning girl, or the help who helped the seniors keep their prescriptions up to date. Her daddy stayed hidden inside. She was the one who did the transporting. And with each new box placed in the back of the car seats there was new excitement and reward. Daddy must have sensed her nature. Some excitement was what Solemn craved. Some adventure and risk taking. And, the last time she walked into the house to see what Daddy had found, she found him sitting alone in the kitchen: relaxed and content. He sweated. He smiled at her. The Richardses had a coffeepot. The hemp bag of coffee near it had a Spanish name. It was nothing he had ever heard of. Redvine brewed himself a cup.
“Bring me my thermos,” he told his daughter.
He sat at a cedar kitchen table with a gleaming varnish he wished someone would hire him to put into place. He knew how to varnish. His father taught him the apt pressure to give so the glimmer wouldn’t pucker and split later. It made everything look better than it was and anything that was not better look pretty damned good.
Solemn bought him his thermos. Redvine filled it with the coffee he made in a pot in the Richards kitchen. Solemn left to the car. “Redvine” to others, “Red” to his wife, “Earl” to himself. He’d leave it there in the house. Because so many other men looked up to him for sticking by his children. Because he always made the honest, however harder, living. Because Bev’s neck really was long and pearls rewound her face. Because nobody really know shit really anyway so it’s okay for everybody not to know it all about him. Because Solemn really belonged in a new paid school, some place can handle her intellect. Money talks, louder than any voice … On top of the tables, cascaded over steps to a brand-new house, piled in the bank, under the bed, under the floor, in the clothes on his back, everywhere … money would be.
The last time he lifted his thermos to drink in the house, a seam along the middle of the index finger of his ladies’ glove stretched to a rip and then a full tear. Redvine rinsed his porcelain coffee cup when he finished. He poured the remaining coffee from the pot into his thermos. It was the last thing he took out of the house. A long drive home, back to Singer’s Trailer Park in Bledsoe, was silent save for Solemn’s songs on the radio.
TWENTY-FOUR
Bev worried and wondered why Red hadn’t called. She didn’t want to bug him, concentrated on her spaghetti instead. With a little extra money, she had driven herself to the Farmers Market on Catherine Street especially for tomatoes. Solemn came in and scooped a mound of it all into a bowl, chewing a loaf of garlic bread. Bev woke up.
“Where your daddy?”
“I don’t know,” Solemn said.
Bev elbowed up from the couch. “You don’t know?”
“He outside.”
Bev sighed. Straight answers had become as impossible with Solemn as straight hair. She looked outside and saw Redvine outside smoking.
“Come on in … I’m warming up spaghetti,” she told him.
Redvine put out his cigarette and came in. Bev had picked up a box of Franzia at the gas station for dinner. She poured him some. Unsettled and a bit rickety, so she spilled a little on the floor, wiped it up. He hushed into the new phones a lot. And Alice Taylor had never come by before with strange friends for him to drive away with unless he came back sweaty drunk. For the most part, Solemn went out with him. But not all the time. He would be gone for a night. Never before had Bev thought of Redvine and another woman. Never at all. But Stephanie seemed to know better, maybe. Was she stupid?
“How’d it go?” she asked him.
“Good,” he told her. “Some folks want me coming back next week.”
“Okay,” Bev said.
* * *
Redvine hid his collection in the unused space of manufactured storage units under the trailer. Once he took care of the utilities and six months’ plot rent and food for summer, he consulted his relatives and folks like Alice Taylor—apologetic—on what was coming up. Or he just stopped by for no reason now, with a trunk of gifts to sell. Birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, christenings, baptisms, anybody he heard was tumbling into love … The DigiCates baned, Redvine could give the people what they really wanted now. Through the month, he parceled out much of the space’s contents to far-apart pawnshops, secondhand stores, and resale shops in Memphis and Jackson. He only took a little at a time. The terse clerks had seen it all. No questions were asked. Redvine shredded the claim receipts he received more than twenty-thousand dollars cash for, when much of it was said and done. On his way back to Bledsoe, he threw the scraps of paper in miscellaneous gas station and pit-stop trash cans. Alice Taylor got hers, hurried it up between hands rolling weed or money all day. Days on the road ended. Just like that.
“If that ‘Walter’ or them DigiCate folks call here, hang up,” Redvine told them. When Bev fussed about impoliteness, Redvine ended it: “Treat ’em like salesmen.”
&n
bsp; Abruptly Redvine gave Solemn glasses one day with little explanation but a pat on her back. The clear-framed jewels helped Solemn renew her relationship with grass, distinguishing between points and blades to comprise the whole she had once only seen as a green blob. The patterns in fabric—corduroy, crocheted, burlap—came to life higher than touch alone. Even the sky held definition to marvel at. Solemn realized the proper dimensions and proportions of the scar in her right knee, not nearly as pronounced as she had thought. Smaller. She still used the leftover DigiCate—to yank font size down smaller and smaller until she couldn’t see it anymore, going deeper and deeper each time.
“You shouldn’t sit up in the house all by yourself,” Redvine tried to explain once. He was more often now thinking about the boys he could one day come home to find in the house with her, behind the thin accordion doors, naked and twisting and involved in the unspeakable. But Solemn was immune to it all, having heard the sounds in the middle of the night and behind the doors of Desiree’s trailer and from the car Landon had sometimes parked near the trailer with a girl inside.
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