A Savage Wisdom

by Norman German

  “You can beat it, Toni. I know you can.” A week after the drive to Lake Charles, for simplicity, Burk had dropped Toni Jo’s middle name.

  Toni Jo looked at the man who had rescued her.

  “I know I can, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Believe me. Maybe if I could have hurt him. But I couldn’t have. He was so pathetic.” She stooped and picked up a yellow plastic shovel floating near the shore. “If he had been well, I think it would’ve been easier. I needed to slap him or shame him. Something. You know what I’m trying to say?”

  “You needed revenge. But it wouldn’t have worked. He wouldn’t have been ashamed. Christ, he had the sweetest angel I’ve ever seen and he thought he could turn her—.”

  “You’re the sweetheart.” Toni Jo hugged his arm.

  Burk raked his fingers through her hair. She was letting it grow. By May, she had a tonsure of burnished brown hair that met the black-brown like a muddy riptide.

  Burk leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, then tried to move to her lips.

  She turned away. “Arkie, don’t. It’s—. I can’t. Not right now. I feel like I could never kiss another man. It’s like he took the heart right out of me.” Toni Jo looked at the kind man. “Maybe later, when I’m over this. I’ll try, okay? That’s all I can promise. You won’t be mad if I can’t, will you?”

  Burk gazed into her eyes and shook his head.

  “No.”

  * * *

  Upon their arrival in Lake Charles, Toni Jo had stayed at Burk’s house on Hodges until she found a room in a boarding house on Bilbo. While Burk was at his lumberyard, Toni Jo window-shopped. They ate at seafood restaurants that seemed like lame imitations of those in New Orleans. They watched the Lake Charles Lakers play a preseason game. Toni Jo couldn’t get interested.

  Sitting in a booth on Saturday at MaryAnn’s, a small, unpretentious diner a notch above the Two-Rat Cafe in DeRidder, Burk could see her languishing.

  “Maybe if you went back to work,” he suggested. “You could probably get a job here at MaryAnn’s.”

  “Nah,” she said, looking around. “I need a change of scenery. Something different.” Burk nodded.

  “I told you the pace would be slower in Lake Charles.”

  A burst of air chuckled from her lips.

  “Yeah, but you didn’t tell me it had no pace.”

  “Hey, it beats what came along with the Big City.”

  “I know.” Toni Jo leaned her head on his shoulders. “I know, Arkie. It’s not your fault. It feels like the life went right out of me.”

  One thing Toni Jo did enjoy was driving up the Jean Lafitte bridge, then under the I-beam scaffolding at its apex. The guardrails were decorated with crossed pirate pistols. She meant to count them some day. At the top, she slowed to take in the view of the Calcasieu River. It made her feel free and clean. In early evening, the refineries lit up like Christmas. Millions of blackbirds in undulating lines reaching to both horizons returned to their roosts after feeding all day in the rice fields. The sunset made her feel like she was on top of the world.

  Almost every night, Toni Jo dreamed about the bridge. As she drove west, the grade became steeper and steeper until, near the pinnacle, cars lost their purchase and tumbled backwards. She wondered how the engineers could have been so dumb. Sometimes, the front wheels of her car would lift off the cement and she would awaken as the car began to fall. In other dreams, she reached the top only to discover that the bridge ended and she would awaken as her car plunged into nothingness.

  Burk suggested Toni Jo visit her mother for a month.

  “Maybe that will help. Get you grounded, you know?”

  She was back within a week.

  “Believe it or not, it’s worse than here,” she said.

  One Sunday in early June, they watched a matinee feature of Laurel and Hardy in Flying Deuces at the Paramount Theatre. Toni Jo laughed twice. After the movie, the couple drove under the bridge and walked along the shore almost a mile towards town. “COLORED BEACH.” The sign suggested they go no farther, but there was a commotion up ahead. As they neared the crowd clustered around a squad car, Toni Jo heard a dark woman wailing.

  On the grassy sand lay a black man, his hands raised against an invisible attacker. A lean deputy in a khaki uniform directed the scene. Standing a full head above everyone else, he moved like a marionette, as if his joints had too much play in them from wear.

  “Who’s that?” Toni Jo asked.

  “Sheriff’s son,” Burk replied. “Just a kid out of college and already his old man’s number one deputy.”

  The deputy’s eye caught the lighter skin of the new spectators. He looked up.

  “Arkie,” he said nodding, officially serious.

  “Slim,” Burk returned. “ What’s the story?”

  “Drowning. Second one this week. Shouldn’t go in over their heads.” He winked at Arkie, who chuckled at the private joke.

  The deputy signaled to the attendants with his pencil. They grabbed the dead man’s stiff arms and lugged him to the ambulance like a heavy suitcase.

  * * *

  Friday, Burk went to New Orleans on business. Toni Jo had asked to travel with him. Burk said it wasn’t a good idea. Three months away from the city wasn’t enough time to get over Nevers.

  When Toni Jo shifted her attention from herself to Burk, a question sprang from her lips.

  “Do you plan to see Bliss?” The emotion surprised her. Toni Jo was jealous.

  “Yes.” Toni Jo’s face clouded with anger. “Of course not, Toni. Can’t you tell when I’m joking by now?”

  Sunday at sunset, Burk dropped by Toni Jo’s room. He honked at the curb, and Toni Jo flew down the stairs.

  Thirty minutes later, she sat before a pillaged banana split at the Borden’s ice-cream parlor on Ryan.

  “Well,” Toni Jo said, “are you going to tell me, or do I have to ask?”

  “No, I didn’t see him.”

  “Did you look?”

  “Yes.”

  “How hard?”

  “He wasn’t there, okay? I looked. The restaurant has a new owner and a new name. He vanished.”

  * * *

  Toni Jo took a job at Muller’s department store. The elevator had intrigued her. The operator, a wizened little man wearing an ill-fitting monkey suit, rarely looked at his passengers. He would hear a command, “Third floor,” and turn the grey handle that reminded Toni Jo of the lever on a Coke machine. There were no indicators on the panel, yet the man, sometimes without observing the light between levels, stopped the booth precisely even with the floor each time. It was a job she could appreciate.

  She lived mechanically through the scorching, humid summer and the long slide into autumn. A refreshing cool front in mid-October made the heat more oppressive than ever. As the Canadian fronts descended more frequently and lingered, the Louisiana countryside turned brown. Tallow trees died into arterial red and child-crayon yellow. Large sycamore leaves made wistful sounds as they rustled on their branches or children shuffled through windblown piles of them in the streets.

  Toni Jo had nothing else to do and doubted she would find anyone better, so she married Arkie Burk in November. It was a loving but passionless marriage. They discussed children. She didn’t know if Burk knew about her abortion. She thought having a child might even the score.

  It was a life.

  Around Christmas, men began to compliment her. She wondered if marriage suited her so well that it created a noticeable change in her appearance.

  “Have we met?” a young man would ask her as she worked the elevator at Muller’s.

  In department store windows, she saw the reflections of men turning for a second look at her.

  “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  “Aren’t you Burton’s daughter? No? Sorry, didn’t mean to intrude.”

  They shook their heads and moved on.

  * * *

  In the Charleston Hotel’s Cyp
ress Room, Burk threw a New Year’s Eve party for the office workers at Lake Area Lumber. For the first time in a year, Toni Jo Burk was happy.

  In mid-January, Arkie made a week-long business trip to Houston. After work one evening, Toni Jo was searching for something to read on the shelves of their sitting room. With two hands, she pulled down a large, hardback copy of Gone With the Wind. Since the novel had won Margaret Mitchell the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, people had been squawking about the impending movie. First, there had been the big fuss over who would play Scarlett. Then endless delays on the set. Finally, the picture was released. The critics said it was the greatest movie ever made. It would probably take another month to arrive in Lake Charles. Toni Jo decided that reading the novel would enhance her enjoyment of the film. She didn’t want to leave a gap on the shelf and reached up to close the breach.

  A novel caught on something behind it. Toni Jo pulled down several books to remove the obstruction. They were magazines. She counted as she retrieved them. Two, three, four. Attractive young women smiled at her from the covers. Free Spirit. New Orleans Girls. Amour. C’est Bon. She backed up. On the cover of New Orleans Girls, the woman smiling at her.

  It was Bliss.

  Toni Jo set the bulky novel on the edge of a lower shelf and flipped pages until she located Bliss. In most of the photos, she wore bathing suits or sheer clothing that revealed the shape of her breasts. In a few, the bottoms of her breasts were exposed. Toni Jo read the captions at the head of Bliss’s pictorial.

  “Priscilla, a night clerk at the Hotel du Monde, formerly a London meter maid who ventured to America to seek her fortune as an actress. Has done some modeling. Does she look familiar? Give yourself a point. She’s one of the Chesterfield girls.”

  Toni Jo smiled at the ridiculous lines. She turned to another girl and read.

  “Darlene, a college girl who likes fast cars, football games, and cool autumn nights with her boyfriends.”

  Toni Jo studied the face of the girl who would so freely reveal her looseness. A little on the pudgy side, Toni Jo thought. Probably couldn’t get a man any other way.

  Amused, she turned to the next poseur.

  “Jessica is a school teacher who likes to grade exams in her panties—and nothing else! Watch out, Jessie, don’t let the principal find out!”

  Toni Jo laughed.

  “Who writes these things?” she wondered aloud.

  She looked at the next picture. It was a weak photograph. The light background blended into the woman’s white hair. In the center of the print, slightly out of focus, Toni Jo’s own face rose to meet her.

  When she finished ripping the magazine apart and throwing it about the room in a screaming frenzy, she started on the others, then worked through two shelves, furiously casting books behind her, knocking over lamps and breaking a vase of artificial flowers. In the calm after her tantrum, she picked through the torn and crumpled pages littered across the floor, searching for parts of her body or face. With perverse curiosity, she decided she wanted to study each snapshot and read the captions to find out more about herself.

  In most of the pictures, she was in the poses struck for Nevers at the picnic in City Park. In others, someone had doctored the negatives to remove the pondside background. In those, she sat on a beach at sunset. One cup of her bathing suit had slipped to show the dark half-moon of a nipple on a breast so voluptuous it looked ridiculously out of proportion to her slender head.

  At the bottom of the page was the name of the magazine. Amour. Toni Jo thought she could find her face on other bodies in other magazines, but her stomach wasn’t up to it.

  As she gathered the sheets to throw them in the garbage, the process came together in her imagination. Nevers couldn’t talk her into posing nude, so he put her face on other women’s bodies.

  Suddenly, Toni Jo knew the rest of her life would be easy. She now hated Herald Nevers.

  Chapter 16

  Valentine’s Day, 1940

  Burk swore he had forgotten about the magazines. Before Nevers fell apart and was hospitalized, Arkie had bought the bundle from him because Bliss was featured in one, but now he no longer cared for her. He asked Toni Jo to forgive him.

  For three days, Toni Jo slept in the spare bedroom. She didn’t make love to Arkie for over a week. At least he’s human, she thought. He had asked her forgiveness. That was more than Nevers had ever done.

  One afternoon, Burk came home early and carried a dress box into the sitting room where his wife was reading.

  “I brought you something.”

  “I see that.”

  “Don’t you want to open it?”

  “No thanks,” she said, looking pleasantly at her husband. “I don’t have to. Nothing in that box will change the way I feel about you.” She smiled. “I just needed some time to get over those pictures.”

  It was the first time Toni Jo saw tears in her husband’s eyes.

  Arkie wanted to do something special for his wife for restoring their old harmony. He had seen her lugging the ponderous novel from room to room for over a week and suggested they drive to Houston for a gala opening of Gone With the Wind.

  By a happy accident, the newly reconciled husband and wife were to see the movie on Valentine’s Day. That Wednesday afternoon, Toni Jo put on her new dress and presented herself to Arkie. As they held each other tightly, Toni Jo looked at their image in the dresser mirror.

  Ecstatically, she said, “It feels like a new beginning. For everything. Arkie, I’m so happy I could die in your arms.”

  Her husband laughed. “And leave me behind? I couldn’t bear it.”

  “Let’s go. I can’t wait to see what everybody’s been raving about for two years.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, they sat in the Presidio Theatre waiting for curtain rise. Just before the scene everyone had been talking about, Toni Jo whispered in Arkie’s ear.

  “This is it.”

  Clark Gable said to Vivian Leigh, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” The audience gasped and Toni Jo giggled. How could they be so shocked, she wondered. But when the audience cried as Scarlett vowed against a blazing sunset never to go hungry again, she wept with them, profusely, into the second handkerchief Arkie had supplied her.

  When the lights went up, the women felt foolish but justified in their happy grief for the maverick woman of the New South. The men cleared their throats and tried not to look at anyone as they casually touched their eyes.

  In her over-excited condition, Toni Jo reviewed the movie’s scenes for the first hour of their drive home, jumping back and forth in the movie’s time, confusing actors with characters, speaking of Scarlett O’Hara, Clark Gable, Ashley Wilkes, and Olivia De Havilland.

  As they drove through Liberty, Toni Jo said, “Wouldn’t it have been grand to live back then, Arkie?” She didn’t expect her husband to reply and didn’t allow him the opportunity as she went on to talk about the burning-of­-Atlanta scene, wondering how they had made it so realistic, “and those poor horses, you know they weren’t acting, they were really afraid of the fire, do you think that’s cruel, Arkie,” and she didn’t give him a chance to answer that question, either.

  Toni Jo tensely recounted the scene where Scarlett shoots a Yankee deserter, then imitated Butterfly McQueen’s squeaky voice saying, “I don’t know nothing ‘bout birthing babies.”

  By the time Arkie reached Beaumont, the emotional ups and downs of Scarlett and Rhett’s story finally took their toll on his wife’s nerves and she wound down to a happily fatigued mood. Slowly, Toni Jo slumped in the seat and fell asleep ten miles from Orange, leaving Arkie alone with his thoughts and the humming of tires on blacktop.

  Arkie Burk could hardly believe his good fortune. While he watched sporadic lightning fulminating in the northeast, he took an inventory of his life. He had a successful business, a beautiful wife, and would have children in no time. What more could a man want? The Germans were kicking up a stir in Europe, but
that was a world away, and when Hitler went too far, they’d spank him back to the hinterlands in a minute. The country was finally climbing out of the Great Depression, and those boys in Washington were making sure it would never happen again. Earlier in the decade, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men had taken care of public enemies like Capone, Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson, and the New Deal would take care of this problem. They weren’t so dumb after all.

  Burk caught himself smiling into the night and laughed at himself. He checked his wife to see if he had disturbed her slumber. She looked like a dark-haired angel. The lightning crackled across the sky like a spider web.

  On the Texas side of the Sabine River, a lone man stood with a thumb in the air, holding his hat down against the wind. Burk had picked up speed to charge the steep bridge when his headlights revealed the hitchhiker. He let up on the accelerator and moved his foot toward the brake, then put it back on the accelerator. Suddenly, he felt sorry for the drifter about to get soaked. He had never been so content, and his happiness transformed into a feeling of generosity and compassion. He braked hard and passed the hitchhiker, then eased back until he came even with the man, who climbed into the back seat.

  Burk stayed in second to the top of the bridge, where he shifted into third as he crossed the state line. He was going seventy when the car hit level ground with a bump, then settled into a dreamy float just as a pregnant cloud’s water broke.

  Burk adjusted the rearview mirror.

  “You’re a lucky man if I ever saw one.”

  “Guess so,” the man said as he took off his hat and ran his fingers through thinning hair. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Don’t mention it. I’m just going to Lake Charles.”

  “That’s fine,” the stranger said. “Much obliged.”

  “From around here?”

  “Hereabouts.”

  When the lightning flashed, Arkie glanced in the mirror. The man didn’t look too clean, but he was friendly enough. He had a week’s growth of whiskers about to call itself a beard, and despite a gaunt face, his eyes seemed alert.

  “Smoke?”