by Brad Watson
“We’re so sorry about your family,” she said. I saw the larger Miss Moses stiffen. “Maybe it will all work out, in time.” The larger Miss Moses frowned and laid a large hand on the small, slim hand of her sister. The smaller Miss Moses drew up like a little night flower sensing the dawn. She seemed about to speak again, but then I saw the larger Miss Moses’s hand tighten a bit, dropping her into silence, her lips visibly clamped shut, eyes large and baleful.
“I’m sorry, Percy,” she said to her sister.
We began to eat.
I had watched as the larger Miss Moses had spooned scarlet pimentos onto the orange mound of grated cheddar cheese, and as she had stirred in a dollop of the mayonnaise—which looked homemade, because the jar was a Mason jar with no label, and the mayonnaise was a little off-white, instead of the white-white color of the store-bought kind.
“This is delicious,” I said to them as I ate the sandwich. “It must be the homemade mayonnaise.”
Their eyes brightened.
“Yes,” said the larger Miss Moses. The smaller Miss Moses seemed to blush then, as if I had chucked her diminutive chin and told her how pretty she was. They watched me eat the sandwich. The look in their eyes was almost tragic.
Fallen Nellie
IN A DENSE PATCH OF PALMETTOS ABOUT TEN YARDS off the nature trail, she lay still and stared up at the broad blue April sky. Her hand gripped a torn blue nylon gym bag. The bag was unzipped, a pair of jeans pulled from it and lying on the ground, the belt still around the jeans waist. Some kind of small black beetle crawled along the cuff. A light Gulf wind swayed the high tufts of longleaf pines, rustled through the small hard leaves of gnarly dwarf oaks, through the long grasses and cattails, clacked the palmetto fronds. Across the glinting lagoon, beach sand skittered grain by grain over little green pads of milkwort, into the striated shadows of sea oats and scrub oak bramble.
Beyond the tall, broad, hoary dunes, surf popped and crushed on the beach’s gentle slope, but she could not see or hear it. She would never see or hear it again. She must have been out there earlier, though, judging by the slightly damp sand between her crimped toes, and the skimpy flowered swimsuit she wore, nothing but three little patches and a couple of strings, a suit for a younger, firmer woman. She wasn’t fat or homely or ugly, just not as fit and pretty as she must have been, once. Her skin looked tired, a little weather-worn, a sallowness her tan didn’t quite disguise. Her mouth had begun to pinch up a bit. Her nose a little veiny, red. You’d almost mistake the small black hole in her forehead for a browsing insect or a tiny smudge. The wound on her shoulder, which had been gnawed tentatively by some small animal, the blood congealed and darkening, would be somehow more disturbing at first, until the notion of what really happened here began to sink in.
Hard to tell about her age, seeing her like this. She was one of those people anywhere between thirty-two and fifty. You just guessed she probably lived life hard. She looked stunned, now, by its swift departure, hard pale blue eyes staring up at the scarcely drifting horsetail clouds that resembled the kind of hairpiece girls wore in the sixties, when she’d have first dreamed of dating boys from the high school, the older boys who populated her fantasies of being older and freed from the humiliation of being a powerless, sexless child. She would have shadowed them already by the time she was twelve, younger than the other bad girls but bolder, too, and that only made her more attractive, dangerous. She was maybe a girl who would act on a dare. A wild girl who’d reach out the window of the car and snatch a flying bug from the air and put her small, buzzing fist, with its ragged chewed nails at the ends of little soiled fingers, right up to your ear. She’d put her tongue in your ear while you were driving seventy on a two-lane. Her tongue in your ear and her hand on your cock, daring you to lose control.
A fall. That’s what they called the hairpiece back then. Pinned it on their crowns and let the long lock fall away down the back. She’d sat on the bed in the room she and her mother shared at Grandmama’s house and watched her mother pin one to the top of her head, pouf it up, turn her head this way and that in the mirror to check it out. And then pecked her on the cheek and left with that man, whose name was Porter something. Longest date she’d ever heard of. A postcard arrived from Missouri, a snapshot from Oklahoma, twenty dollars from some little town in Washington State. Her mother sent a finger-length lock of her hair. Some fingernail clippings, for some odd reason, faded red hard and dry thick crescents. Her Alabama driver’s license, expired. Good riddance, her grandmother finally said one night, tired of hearing Nellie cry. Get her out of your system like a piece of bad meat, she’s my child but was never any good, we’re better off this way, just think of me as your mama and grandmama, too, I ain’t going nowhere, I’m tough as an old pine knot, I am.
Grandmama didn’t turn on her or give up when she started acting just like her mama had, going wild with boys, with booze, with pills, with weed, and generally trashy acting out. She was one of those girls at the Hangout, public beach, always jumping into this car or that, going off, coming back, jumping in, jumping out, a cold can of this or that in her hand, Schlitz, Busch Bavarian. She was nothing but a little Hangout whore. She despised those goody little Fairhope boys, those Montrose boys, all those boys in their daddies’ cars with good weed and folding money and so much time on their hands, boys who rode around shouting about pussy, calling it that, whispering, Please, Nellie, gimme a little pussy. She came on strong and turned the tables, made them fear their own desire, watched them slink back to their corsaged sweethearts who left their middle fingers smelling like moist talcum powder and Massengill’s douche. She, baby, was a day-old oyster, she was a steamed mollusk on their tongues, made them go down where their little peckers would go, poking about inside their jeans like blind puppies after the teat, and it was only her they breathed in that closeness, no powder, no perfume, the heavy slick and salty firmness they never expected. She held them there with strong thumb and finger-knuckle by their large, soft, voluted ears.
Her grandparents’ cottage back on the bay, made of heart pine her grandpapa milled and nailed together in ’26, just after the hurricane that year, that sealed itself with heart sap so you couldn’t drive a tenpenny nail into it now, it was like iron, the pictures on the walls had never been moved because no one could even tap a little tack between the grains, and it stood through more than half a dozen hurricanes since, and dozens of tropical storms. Doors and windows battened, she and Mama and Papa, her grandparents, sat in the living room, Papa smoking his pipe, Mama quilting or shelling beans, she sitting with her knees pulled up and painting her little watercolors on a piece of paper in a sketchbook, all the tourists fled like the deer to high ground. Not she and Mama and Papa, though, as God willing you didn’t leave home for a gale. She, Nellie, wasn’t afraid of the weather, it made her excited. She touched herself sometimes during storms. She painted her pictures of birds blown awry by the gale in trees bent double and leaves ashriek, birds tumbling like blasted feathery leaves in the howling winds. Frederic got no more than part of the roof in ’79, though whole pieces of other homes, gables and porches, hung in the live oaks around the house like they’d rained down from bomb blasts, dunes on the Gulf side mostly gone except in the wildlife refuge, where she lay now.
But she’d been well gone from their home by then, hadn’t lived there since that previous spring, a few months after her grandpapa passed away, when she’d walked off from Foley High one day, got into Melvin’s Corvette, and never went back. Melvin had the good stuff then, redbud, quaaludes, they had a good time. Spent the summer in his parents’ cabin on Bay La Launch, nobody there but fishermen and retirees percolating into death. They sold Melvin’s boat to a boy from Bay Minette who believed he could make a living shrimping. No one believed that anymore. No one knew that better than her, it was what her grandpapa had done all his life until it wasn’t possible for even someone such as him to make it work smalltime anymore.
After Melvin’s father kick
ed them out and Melvin insisted on going ahead to Wisconsin without her, said he would grow cannabis tall as corn and bring her up when the growing got good and he’d made some money, she tended bar at Top o’ the Port, lying about her age, and did tricks with conventioneers when the Passport Inn was still the only real hotel on the beach, before they built the center at the state park. Old boys there with aluminum siding, fertilizer, sod operations—Arcus, Kaarrrl, Buck, Oliver—hogfat, sawtoothed, streak o’ lean. Boys getting thick and heavy-necked. They thought her a hot beach babe all right, with her tan and bleached hair and hard blue eyes the color of the slick cold clay the poor women ate in the country up near White House Fork. Her aunt up there was one of them, still ate the stuff about once a month, and Nellie’d fetched it for her more than once, in a little paper sack her aunt gave her, saying, Here, hon, go fetch me some dirt out of that bank back of the house. About all there was to do up at her aunt’s, where they sent her when she wouldn’t stay out of the Gulf, riding the riptide way on out, fearless, a tiny white naked body with a bushel of wild black hair, just a speck out there and them screaming on the beach, but she never feared the water. She tried eating the clay once, a bland cold confection with only the mild stink of the earth about it. Auntie had a craving for it. She, Nellie, shuddered at the thought, as if it were a craving for the grave, to eat and become what she came from, hard cold clay and forgotten forever. You are what you eat! Auntie said, baring her yellow canines with her deep, hoarse laugh.
So she was not in her old safe home when Frederic came through and blew just about everything else away, was not with Melvin back on the bay. All the little old cottages that had been there since the thirties and forties, including the one she rented, were lifted off their blocks or wrenched from their pilings and drifted, floating, till they folded into flattened ruins. The old wooden boat she’d clung to floated all the way to the Winn-Dixie by the bridge, and they wrote a story about her in the Islander: “Rub-A-Dub-Dub, a Girl in a Tub,” though it wasn’t even a tub at all. The Passport survived, the drugstore, a piece of the Hangout, the Lighthouse, a couple of other little motels. Everything else was just washed-out dunes and debris, the outer peninsula past her mama’s house scattered with the flotsam of beach retreats: washer tubs and dryer drums, twisted bedsprings, busted stoves and sand-scoured frying pans and Dutch ovens and butcher knives and forks and spoons from rickety beach-shack kitchens, toilet tanks and commode seats, and the pages of thousands of trashy paperback novels scattered like dried and warped discolored autumn leaves. She worked inland for two years, at a little joint on 59, and then on the bay on the other side of Fish River, a bar and restaurant there, a little more upscale. Time passed. At twenty-four she could feel herself aging in increments as small but distinct as the ticks of a clock. She could feel the fluid swirl in each tiny cell, microscopic planets bound by a body, an infinitesimal universe speeding away from all others. She had a vision of this and was stricken with fear that woke her at two, three in the morning parched and dizzy. She grasped at others to decrease her speed, Biloxi gamblers, itinerant roofers, lonely old snowbirds, and finally mostly regular local trash, reaching for them as she sped past, and at this speed they had no faces, no names. In this manner she tumbled through time all the way to the very end of it. Doesn’t matter which one did it to her, which gaptooth left her here in the palmettos beside the trail in the wildlife preserve along the beautiful white dunes of Bon Secour Beach. It was done.
Are You Mr. Lonelee?
I THOUGHT I HEARD A WOMAN SNEAKING UP ON ME IN the grass. This is the predatory season for women, when men lie pale and naked in their yards like dazed birds. I let my head drop casually over the side of the lawn chair, open one eye, look. No woman. It could have been the birds.
You never know what will come up from behind. I take a shot from my flask and shift in the lawn chair. Even the mailman, crossing the yard to the neighbor’s house, can make me jump and stare.
Two days ago this woman snuck up on me and watched me for five minutes before I knew she was there. I jumped up and the beer resting on my stomach spilled.
“Look out, there, cowboy,” she said.
She was stunning. Very young, tall, and tanned, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t cover her browned belly, where there was a single gold ring piercing her navel. Her hair, maybe a natural blond, was cut short and stood up on her head as if she’d been shocked, but her expression was calm. She sat down on the edge of the lawn chair and took a sip of what was left of my beer.
“Are you Conroy?”
I nodded and glanced at her navel. “Who are you?”
“I’m working on that,” she said with a little laugh from her throat. She drained the rest of my beer.
“All right,” I said, for I’d been trying to loosen up a little the last few months.
“I got your name off the mailbox,” she said.
I INVITED HER IN for a colder beer and she didn’t leave for two days. I think she was just hungry, mostly. I took a shower and when I came out she was at the kitchen sink, ripping bites off a cold roast chicken I’d had in the fridge since Friday.
During those two days, she took about eight showers, walking naked from the billowing steam of the bathroom and padding about the place drip-drying or coming up to me and pressing herself into my clothes until I was wet, too, and when I took them off she pulled me into the bedroom, or onto the sofa or the floor. She pinned me down and rode me, come to think of it, like I was one of those mechanical bulls in bars. I think she even slapped my thigh one time.
I looked up at her from the laundry room floor, my head wedged into a pile of wet towels. “Really, you know,” I said, “I think I need to know your name.”
“Sylvia,” she said.
“Sylvia,” I said. “All right, then.”
But you can never tell what will come up from behind. I take another shot from the flask and close my eyes, let the sun burn the liquid out again. I’m getting brown, burning down to the muscle. All I seem to want is purge.
FOUR MONTHS AGO, my wife died. I’ve tried hard not to think of her since, but it’s proved almost impossible.
My house is full of her things: leftover prescription bottles, a makeup kit, patent leather shoes and sneakers and dainty sandals, a diaphragm that she called her “bonnet,” hair curlers, old grocery lists, wrinkled blouses packed into the backs of drawers, notes asking me to meet her at church that night, hundreds of useless pots and pans, dumb aphorisms on lacquered plaques, sheets and towels with the initials of her maiden name sewn in. The list could go on. I can’t seem to throw or give any of it away. I sleep with one of her favorite old quilts at the foot of my bed.
A month or so after her death, I decided I was going to get away from the house for a while, rent it out, let someone else bother with the mess. I put an ad in the paper and almost immediately this enormous, red-faced, blond-haired woman answered. I interviewed her in my den.
It took me a minute to realize how fat this woman really was. She had trouble getting through the front door. She sat down and took up half the space of the single bed I used for a sofa, and I heard the old springs groan as it sagged. I couldn’t tell if that embarrassed her or not. I really didn’t know what to think.
I rented her my house, though. Partly because I’d have hated to refuse her just because she was big. But also I had the feeling that the house would be safe with her. She promised not to sit in my wife’s old rocker and I rented the place to her then and there. I couldn’t believe she’d brought it up herself. It almost made me feel worse than if I’d said it.
MY WIFE AND I had run a two-person ad shop downtown in the Threefoot Building. I often worked there until very late so I’d fixed it up with a small daybed for catnaps. There was a men’s room down the hall where I could take bird baths. I lived there for almost a month.
Things went fine until one night, Crews, the night watchman, dropped in on me with a bottle of Ezra Brooks.
“You look li
ke you could use a drink, Mr. Conroy.”
Crews was retired from the city water and sewer department. He carried a fat radio to call the cops if he had to, but no gun. He was tall, shaved his head to hide the gray hair, and generally had the air about him of a man of leisure. He walked like a hip cat, paddling his palms to the rear as he strode the halls like he was walking with some ease through water. Now, having knocked on and opened my office door, he stood in the opening, his old eyebrows raised.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve had a drink in three weeks.”
Crews held the bottle up, hand poised to uncork the top.
I thought about it a moment and motioned him in.
“What’s with the ‘Mr. Conroy’?” I said. “Just call me Conroy.”
“Oh, yes, last names,” Crews said. “Like gentlemen.” He’d already been into the bottle and was affecting a dapper air.
“Oh, yes,” I said, going along. “At the club.”
“Indeed,” Crews said. He poured me a slug of the bourbon into one of the Dixie Cups he’d brought with him.
We had a pretty good time. Crews had a finger-snapping little shuffle dance he did. He sang “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” I did Tom Waits grumbling through “Long Way Home.” We kept slugging the whiskey. I walked over to the window, unzipped, and lobbed a stream down eleven stories through the neon light of old downtown. Crews ran over and stuck his dirty old Security cap under me, rasping out a laugh, and said, “Man, you gon’ get us both arrested.” I went ahead and emptied into his cap. He became sober-looking, thoughtful, then shook the cap out and put it back on his head, doubling over into that raspy laugh again.