“Arnold, for heaven’s sake, these are prescribed by my doctor. Maybe he knows what’s good for me even better than you do. Could that be?”
“You don’t seem sick to me. What you need all that medicine for?”
“So I don’t get sick,” she said. “It’s like preventative medicine.”
“That’s bullshit,” he said.
“Arnold.” Courtney turned to glare at him. “What is wrong with you?”
“Drugs ruin your damn life. I don’t care if you get them off the street or where. I know what I’m talking about too. You act the same as a junkie, counting all them pills. You act like you enjoy it.”
“Lord, Arnold. Are you trying to pick a fight here?”
“No,” he said.
“I don’t think you want to get in a fight with me, son.”
He looked like he was being called out of a dream. Like he was just beginning to remember where he was. His eyes were brimming, but he seemed to catch himself before he fell into his feelings full force. He walked over to the counter where Courtney stood in her monogrammed pajamas and robe. “You think I could have some that cherry cobbler?”
Courtney looked at him with obvious irritation. It took a moment for his change in demeanor to register. She swallowed her fistfuls of pills with a glass of tap water before answering him. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll heat it up for you. You want ice cream too?”
He nodded.
While she set out to fix his cobbler, she said, “You must have one heck of a cell phone bill. You were in that bathroom there almost two hours.”
“I wasn’t on the phone the whole time,” he said.
“You talking to a girl?”
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“She go by Vonnie.”
“From home? San Diego?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she must have a lot to say,” Courtney tried to tease.
“She got lot of problems,” he said.
“And you’re trying to help her?”
“Naw. I ain’t no help.” His voice broke.
“I bet you are,” she insisted. “Truely,” she called across the room, “Arnold is having cobbler. You want some too?”
Truely got up and walked into the kitchen. “I’ll pass on the cobbler,” he said, opening the refrigerator and taking out the leftover collards. He dished some cold collards into a bowl, got a piece of cornbread and crumbled it into the bowl too, then sprinkled a generous amount of pepper sauce on top.
“You want me to heat that up for you?” Courtney asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s good cold.”
“Don’t look too good,” Arnold commented.
How many years had it been since Truely had had a late-night bowl of cold greens? He smashed the cornbread into the pot liquor and let it soak up the flavor. It was something he had seen his daddy do a hundred times when he was a boy. Nights when his mother went to bed early his daddy would often fix himself a bowl of cold pot liquor and take the leftover biscuits or cornbread from supper and crumble them into it. More than a few nights his daddy sat alone outside on the back steps with a Tupperware bowl in his hand, sopping his bread into the pot liquor. On rare occasions young Truely might go out and sit beside him, maybe with a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream, which was practically the only kind of ice cream he could ever remember his mother buying. The two of them would sit silently, and stare at the stars or listen to the crickets singing their sad, sad song. It had never occurred to him then that maybe his daddy was just the slightest bit sad too.
“Here.” Courtney set Arnold’s cobbler on the table. “Sit right here.”
He sat down and Truely pulled out a chair beside him. Courtney poured herself a small glass of port and sat down too. The TV was still jabbering across the room, the war in Iraq was still raging, Gordo was still wounded, life still hung in the balance there. But here, the three of them sat in the near darkness and shared the silence the same way Truely and his daddy once had.
When Arnold finished eating, he looked at Truely. “We still going fishing tomorrow?”
“I guess so. Want to see what we can do at San Pablo Reservoir.”
“Count me out,” Courtney said.
“Is it because you’re mad at me?” Arnold asked.
“It’s because I want to bake tomorrow. I’m thinking peanut butter cookies.”
“She mad at me,” Arnold said to Truely.
“If she was mad at you, Arnold, there’d be no doubt about it.”
“I do think you need to learn to respect your elders,” Courtney said.
“I know,” he agreed. “Sorry.”
“It’s in the Bible, Arnold.”
“I know,” he said again.
THAT NIGHT, before he got in bed, in a welcomed attempt to be light, Arnold sorted through his tangle of bedcovers, saying, “Okay, where’s my man, Malcolm?”
“It’s not a books-on-tape night,” Truely told him. “It’s Friday.”
“I know, but Red got me on pins and needles,” he said sarcastically. “I got to see what the dude gon do next. And if he get too slow, then maybe he just help me get off to sleep.”
Courtney looked at Truely across the dark room and gave him a weary thumbs-up.
Nineteen
THE NEXT MORNING Truely and Arnold were up predawn. Truely had set his alarm for five a.m. and it had awakened everybody. While he and Arnold threw on some jeans and flannel shirts, Courtney got up just long enough to pack them a lunch: roast beef sandwiches, pickles, and big slabs of carrot cake. They were out the door and on their way well before sunup.
First thing, they stopped at the Circle K so Truely could get some bad coffee. Arnold didn’t actually drink coffee, but he got some too since Truely did. He muffled the taste with milk and too many packets of sugar to count. Truely offered him a doughnut, but he declined, saying, “Too early to eat.” They drove through the sleeping city and across the Bay Bridge in near silence. It was too early to try to talk too. The next stop was Dupree’s Bait, a hard-to-find, hole-in-the-wall bait shop, where the old guy running the place seemed to know Truely, calling him Mr. Noonan. He was a black guy, looked to be a couple hundred years old, sporting a shiny bald head with white cotton balls of hair around his ears. He gave Arnold the once-over when they got out of the car. “Who you got here?” he asked.
“This is my buddy Arnold,” Truely said. “Taking him over to San Pablo — see if we can get some trout to bite.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. Arnold’s grandmama comes from Mississippi too,” Truely said. “Yazoo City.”
“You don’t say?”
“Dupree is from Mississippi,” Truely explained to Arnold.
“They done run me out of down there long time ago.” He chuckled. “There’s some old ladies down there still got they hearts broke.”
“You too old to start lying now, Dupree,” Truely said.
“Boy, you still got people down there?”
“My family stay in San Diego,” Arnold said. “I ain’t country.”
Dupree got a good laugh out of that. “Course you ain’t. I can look at you and see you one them urban-nites.” He snickered. “What bring you up here?”
“Got a job,” he said.
“Where you stay at?”
“At his place.” He nodded at Truely.
Dupree raised his eyebrows. “Well, I reckon you living high then.”
Truely got a couple of boxes of worms out of the cooler. “You got any chicken livers today, Dupree?” he asked.
“You know I got chicken livers.” Dupree walked slowly to a refrigerator in the back of his shed. “You ever know me not to have no livers?” He reached into the freezer compartment and pulled out a plastic baggie of frozen livers. In slow motion he set out to wrap the livers in some old newspaper. “Use these here and you might get you some them bottom-feeding catfish. They got some big ones can’t nobody catch. Myself, I rather have a
good catfish than a trout any day.”
“Lots of folks might disagree with that,” Truely said.
“If they do, it’s cause they don’t know how to cook no fish. You miscook a fish and it ain’t worth nothing, don’t matter what kind it is.”
“You’re right about that.” Truely handed the bait to Arnold, who headed back to the car while Truely paid Dupree. Dupree took his time counting out the change. At one point he looked up at Truely and said, “If I was you, Mr. Noonan, I’d keep my eye on that boy out there. I wouldn’t turn my back on him. Something about that boy don’t seem right.”
Truely was startled by the unsolicited comment. He tried to laugh it off. “You’re wrong, Dupree. He’s a good kid. Just got a lot on his mind.”
“That the part that worry me,” Dupree said. “What he got on his mind.”
When Truely got in the car, Arnold responded as if he had heard Dupree’s remark, which of course was impossible since he had been waiting out in the car. “That old man talk too much,” Arnold said, annoyed. “That how they do down in Mississippi?”
“Pretty much,” Truely said.
WITHOUT COURTNEY ALONG, a fishing trip was a totally different experience. For one thing, there was no home base, no cooler of drinks with ice, or blankets lovingly arranged on the bank. Just two paper sacks of sandwiches — and the basic tools of the serious fisherman. They parked the car and walked a short path to the water’s edge. At a distance were several other fishermen sitting in folding chairs, manning multiple stationary rods at a time. And out on the water were a few small rented rowboats occupied by slump-shouldered, sleepy-looking men in sun hats, drinking coffee from thermoses.
Almost immediately, Truely and Arnold split up and went in separate directions. They remained within sight of one another, but not within word range. Instantly Truely relaxed and went inward, which was one of the great benefits of fishing. He did some of his best thinking on the bank of a river, or in this case, a reservoir. They should be able to get in several good hours before the midday sun heated the surface of the water, driving the fish into hiding.
Truely watched Arnold at a distance. He saw him carefully skewer the chicken livers on his fly hook. He saw the way he nervously cast his line the first few times. It didn’t take him long to become more confident and throw his line like the natural extension of his arm, the way Truely had shown him, smooth, easy, with nearly perfect aim. Arnold had found a shady spot and stood planted there. Twice Truely noticed him pull in fish. The first small one he threw back. The second one, large enough to put up a decent fight, he kept in a mesh sack at the water’s edge.
The pink light of sunrise had surrendered. It seemed it would be an overcast day, threatening rain — a perfect day in Truely’s mind. He didn’t know what it said about him that he loved the rain so much. Mornings when he awoke to the sound of pounding rain, while rare, made him instantly happy — always had. As a boy he had loved school days most too when rainstorms raged with lightning and thunder and the sort of downpour that forced an awe-inspired silence among otherwise rowdy kids. He had loved being in cozy, yellow-lit classrooms, with teachers who had seemed, on stormy days at least, to genuinely love their students.
He remembered certain rainy Sundays when he and Jesse would stay inside all day in their pajamas and watch sad movies and make crazy love and be, to his mind, nearly totally happy. Later she graded papers while he made sloppy joes, which they ate outside on the covered terrace with the windswept rain flying in all directions around them.
It was funny the way memory obliged the heart. His happy recollections were always afloat in his soupy subconscious where so many of his darker memories had sunk to the underbelly of his past and been as good as lost forever. But without conscious instruction, memory had edited and enlarged the finest moments of his life and stored them like masterpieces in the private gallery of his personal history. He assumed this must be true for most people — although by this point in his life he should have learned never, never to assume.
Renewed by several hours of quiet and a contented day of catch-and-release, Truely walked toward the distant spot Arnold had claimed. “Ready to shut it down?” he called out. Arnold nodded and began to reel in his line. The two of them sat on bank’s edge and ate the lunches Courtney had packed. Arnold started with his carrot cake, breaking off big chunks, popping them in his mouth. Truely unwrapped his roast beef sandwich, made from last night’s leftovers. Courtney had slathered his with horseradish just the way he liked it too. Nothing like hours of silence to work up a healthy appetite.
“How many fish you got there?” Truely asked, looking at the mesh net in the water at their feet.
“Three,” Arnold said. “Me, you and Courtney. Thought we’d eat them tonight. Maybe Courtney’d cook them for us.”
“You ever clean a fish?” Truely asked.
“I seen it done.”
“We’ll clean them when we get back to the car,” Truely said. “Take them home ready for the skillet.”
They loaded up their equipment and walked back to the car. Truely retrieved a warped board from the roadside brush. “Flat surface,” he said. He laid the fish out and took a knife from his tackle box. “Remove the heads,” he said. “Like this.” He sliced off the head of the first fish just behind the smallest throbbing gill. “Then slice the belly open, like so.” He showed Arnold how to gut the fish, slinging the innards into a leftover lunch sack since there were no cats nearby to dine on the guts. “Now all we got to do is get these scales off.” He dug through the tackle box for the tool he needed. “You scrape in this direction — against the grain. See?” Truely could clean a fish with his eyes closed. He’d probably cleaned close to a million of them in his lifetime. “Okay,” he said. “You clean these two, man. On the way home we’ll stop at Dupree’s and get some ice to ice them down.”
Arnold squatted down over the board where the two remaining fish were laid out. While he went to work cleaning them with the queasy stomach of a first timer, Truely loaded their stuff in the car.
“This right here about make you think you don’t want to eat no fish,” Arnold said.
AFTER THE FISH WERE CLEANED and iced and the two of them had washed up at Dupree’s and were en route home, suspended somewhere midair on the Bay Bridge, the clouds above them bruised and swollen, threatening to unleash at the first clap of thunder, Arnold said, “Man, I appreciate how you don’t never ask me no questions.”
It was not a comment Truely was prepared for. “Should I be asking you questions?”
“I figure you don’t like nobody asking you no questions, so then to prove it, you don’t ask nobody any questions yourself.”
This was a new version of an old complaint that had been lodged against Truely before, no less subtly. “Look, man,” Truely said. “If you got something you want to tell me — I’m listening.”
After a cautious pause Arnold said, “We got some problems.”
“We? Who’s we?”
“Me and Vonnie.”
“Vonnie is the girl you talk to on the phone all the time?”
“Yeah.”
“Your girlfriend?” Already Truely was imagining that maybe Arnold had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. He was trying to think what in the world you tell a young man in a situation like that.
“Naw. Vonnie is my sister, man. Her name is Vontell, but everybody call her Vonnie.”
“Got it,” Truely said.
“She been staying over at my grandmama’s house.”
“Yeah?”
“My mama’s boyfriend, he run her out of my mama’s house — same as he done me. So she been staying with my grandmama, but they don’t get along that good.”
“Is that the problem?”
“No, man. That ain’t it.”
“What is it then?”
Arnold sucked in a big breath and let it out slow, like a tire with a hidden puncture wound, a slow leak. “Remember I told you my mama have some issues.”
“I remember.”
“She got a drug problem, man. She been sick long as I can remember. Then she get this new boyfriend and he just make it worse. Vonnie can’t stand to watch it and she can’t do nothing to stop it either. So she go over to my grandmama’s house and she gets to crying and everything, tells my grandmama what’s going on over there. So then my grandmama call the police on them.”
Truely didn’t speak. He was listening.
“So the police come around there. They arrest my mama.”
“Oh, man,” Truely said.
“It ain’t the first time,” Arnold said. “Usually she get out in a few days. But not this time. They got her locked up for real. Look like she going to do big jail time.”
Truely let out a long, low whistle. It was a habit of his when he was at a loss for actual words. It generally made his point.
“We was trying to get her boyfriend out of there. He’s the one was running drugs out her house. She just do what he say. Not that she’s no angel or nothing. Mama, she needs some help. But she’s too stubborn. Now look like she’s going to jail instead.”
“I’m sorry,” Truely said. “That’s one hell of a mess you got there.”
“Yeah.”
“How can I help you? What can I do?”
“You know any lawyers in San Diego?”
“I can make some calls. Try to get a referral maybe. What else?”
“Maybe we don’t tell Courtney about this?”
“Really?”
“I don’t want her getting no low opinion of nobody. She liable to think she can set them straight or something. She be loading them up with them damn books on tape.”
Truely laughed. “Hard to keep a secret from Courtney.”
“You saying we got to tell her?”
“I’m saying it’s up to you. You tell her when you’re ready.”
“All right, then.”
They crept along in silence for a while. It looked like maybe there had been an accident up ahead on the bridge. A misty drizzle had begun and the bridge was slick with shine. Truely thought he could see flashing lights in the distance. Nothing to do but relax and wait it out. They were in no hurry. Truely was oddly satisfied to be sitting in the car with Arnold slumped in the seat beside him, the windshield fogged, their cleaned, iced fish in a cooler in the backseat. There was nowhere else he wished to be.
Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi Page 24