Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi

by Nanci Kincaid

  “I said wait until I call you. Why can’t you do like I say? You got to get the bus.”

  “I’m not taking the bus.” She folded her arms across her chest.

  “Can we get Vonnie a cab?” Arnold asked Truely. “She need to get back home, man. She can’t stay here.”

  “Sure,” Truely said.

  “I don’t want no damn cab. Don’t get me no cab,” she instructed Truely.

  “You going home,” Arnold said. “Don’t test me, Vonnie.”

  She began to cry then. “I don’t see what it would hurt. You just selfish. Don’t care about nobody but yourself.”

  “I got my reasons.” Arnold waved to the doorman for a cab. “Ima call you,” he said, “tell you when you can come back. Don’t you come back until I say so.”

  “I hate you.” Vonnie was crying into her hands now.

  Arnold led Vonnie outside. Truely and Courtney followed behind them silently, like shadows. Arnold stepped over to a cab and opened the door for her. “Get in,” he ordered. When she refused to budge, he grabbed her arm and yanked her over to the cab while she yelled, “Get your hands off me.” People were turning to stare at them.

  Truely and Courtney stepped back on instinct. Maybe they were just too tired to interfere. Maybe they had no real idea what to do.

  When Arnold had more or less shoved the sobbing Vonnie into the cab he slammed the door closed and turned to Truely. “You got some money?”

  Truely pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. “This enough?”

  “You got another one of those?” he asked.

  Truely handed him a hundred bucks and Arnold gave the money to Vonnie. “Stop crying,” he said. “Here, take this.” He shoved the money in her face. “Don’t come back over here until I call you. I mean it, Vonnie.”

  Vonnie took the money. “I hate you,” she repeated.

  Arnold told the cab driver where to take Vonnie. “Don’t let her get out nowhere else,” he said. “I don’t care if she beg you. Make sure you get her home.”

  As the cab pulled out into traffic Arnold stood and watched. Truely and Courtney were slightly stunned by the events. They waited for Arnold before going upstairs to their rooms. When the cab was out of sight and Arnold turned around they could see that he was nearly crying. “Lord, Arnold,” Courtney whispered. Truely slung his arm around Arnold’s shoulder and they walked to the elevator in silence.

  Twenty-five

  UPSTAIRS IN THEIR HOTEL ROOMS they began to get ready for bed without saying much. The TV was going in Truely’s room with Arnold manning the remote — no station getting more than a two-second chance to interest him. Truely checked his messages — Mose Jones had left one. Two from Jaxon. One from a woman he didn’t know. He nearly erased it before he realized it was Tay-Ann.

  “Truely,” she said, “I just want to thank you again for your condolence call. I’m sorry I went to pieces on you like that. I’m doing a lot better today. They say the loss gets a little easier each day that passes, so I’m trying to believe that. I just wanted to say, you know — thanks.” And she had hung up.

  He saved the message. He would need to listen to it again later when he was alone. He listened differently when he was alone than when he had his two self-appointed sidekicks surrounding him, listening to him listen.

  Through the open adjoining door Truely could see Courtney unpacking her overnight bag, lining up her medications on the bathroom counter just like she did at home. He thought she was like a woman in a trance when she executed this ritual. He turned his head away, hating to watch her medicate herself night after night no matter her reasons. He sat down at the small desk and jotted down a few things he needed to take care of tomorrow. In recent years he had become a list maker just like his daddy used to be. Courtney got into the minibar and poured them each a large glass of unremarkable red wine and an apple juice for Arnold. When she carried the drinks into their room she clicked the TV off — which had the effect of taking Arnold off a respirator. “Okay, y’all,” she said. You could see the shine of her face where she had put on some slick night cream. She had also patted some white stuff under each of her renewed eyes. “Okay, baby boys,” she said, “I’ve got an idea.”

  Arnold rolled his eyes, but looked interested.

  “Can you stop what you’re doing, True?” she asked. “Can you just give me a minute and hear me out.” Courtney, although more or less the self-appointed ruler of their three-person world, rarely issued such a direct request.

  Truely put down his pen and shoved the paper aside. “I’m all ears.”

  “Y’all come sit over here.” Courtney patted the bed where she now sat propped up Indian-style. Courtney handed Truely his wine and he took a seat on the bed as instructed. He and Arnold looked at Courtney as if waiting for further orders. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “You know how Arnold always says no secrets among friends, right? Well, that’s bull, right? So we’re going to go around — and we’re each going to tell one secret. Like a confession, see? And it can’t be a little insignificant secret neither. It’s got to be something big. It’s got to hurt you a little to tell it. You’ve got to be worried the others might get up and run from the room when you tell it. Right?”

  “What the hell kind of game is that?” Truely asked.

  “It’s not a game. It’s stopping the game playing, True, don’t you see? It’s about trust. And we’ve all got to do it.”

  “Lord, Courtney, where do you get off making up all these rules?”

  “You saying you ain’t going to do it?” Arnold asked him, in an almost accusatory tone.

  “He’ll do it,” Courtney answered for him. “He’ll hate it, but he’ll do it.”

  “Excuse me,” Truely snapped, “but I believe I can answer for myself.”

  “What you say then?” Arnold asked.

  “Can you tell me why this is necessary, Court? You been reading some New Age book again or what?”

  “It’s not something I can explain to you,” Courtney said. “I just know we have to do it. They say the truth will set you free. And it’s time.” Courtney had finished her glass of wine quickly — she had practically gulped it down. She got up and went for more. “Just a minute,” she said. “Wait.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Truely asked Arnold while Courtney was out of the room.

  “You know how your cell phone message center get too full?” Arnold said. “You can’t take in no new messages when your message center get full. You got to delete some crap, right? I guess it’s like that.”

  “What if we don’t actually have any big secrets?” Truely asked. “Then what?”

  Courtney scowled at him. “So help me, Truely Noonan, if you try to go there I will have to personally kill you. Maybe you’re going to act like you can’t think of any big secrets you have, but I can think of several for you. You want me to take your turn and mine both?”

  “I’d sure as hell love to know what you think my big secrets are.”

  “Y’all can fuss later,” Arnold said. “We gon do this or not?”

  “No guts no glory,” Courtney said.

  “Maybe we ought to give Courtney more than one run at it,” Truely said sarcastically. “She’s going to have trouble making her personal selection from among her long list of possibilities. Aren’t you, big sister?”

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  “Ya’ll stop,” Arnold said. “Y’all got to act right if we gon to do this.”

  “Okay.” Courtney bounced down on the bed, sloshing Truely’s wine nearly out of his glass. “Who goes first?”

  “Truely got to go first,” Arnold insisted.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “So you can’t hear what me and Courtney say and then you back out.”

  “Damn,” he said. “You two got a high opinion of me. I see that.”

  “Okay, bro, you’re up.” Courtney raised her glass as if to toast him. “Spill.”

  Maybe it was because he
was exhausted or because he felt like he was being dared. Maybe it was because Courtney was right and the time had finally come. The chance to let go of what seemed to him the only real secret he’d ever managed to keep was just too compelling. Truely found himself opening his mouth, unsure what would come out. “Y’all want big? Is that right?”

  “Biggest you got,” Arnold said.

  “Okay.” He stood up and paced a little. He could not have explained why he was telling the truth like this now, saying what he had vowed never to say in his life, but he opened his mouth and it seemed the truth just worked its way out. “When I was in high school — Courtney had already moved out to California — Mose Jones and I took Mother’s old station wagon and said we were going to a science fair or some such foolishness over in Louisiana. We really went down to New Orleans and got ourselves into some harmless little nothing trouble down there — but on the way back home we went through Meridian, Mississippi. Mose claimed he knew a girl over in Meridian, but of course when we got there he never could conjure her up — but that’s beside the point.”

  Truely paused and looked at Arnold and Courtney. He had time to change his mind. He hadn’t traveled the trail of truth so far he couldn’t U-turn and come back to the safety of secret-keeping. Whether it was decision or instinct he wasn’t sure, but he kept talking.

  “We’re driving by this run-down motel outside Meridian, right? One of those real tacky places. And it’s late too. Damn late. It is maybe three o’clock in the morning. Mose is driving and I’m just looking out the window at all the nothing, right? Then I see it. Daddy’s old truck. Courtney can tell you there wasn’t but one truck in the world like it. He had these fish decals all over the back. He had this gun rack where he kept a little pickax and some rope and whatnot. He might just as well have had his name written out on the side of that truck.”

  Truely paused because remembering, when he let himself, slowed it all down. He remembered it just the way it had happened — and he felt just the way he had felt too. Like the ground they rode on came out from under them and they were free-falling, Mose and him, through a senseless world with nothing solid holding it together.

  “Go on,” Courtney said. “What?”

  “Daddy’s truck was parked outside motel room fourteen. I remember it like it was my birthday. Fourteen. Stop! I yell at Mose. That’s my daddy’s truck back there. You’re crazy, man, Mose said. See Mose and Daddy, they never did get along that good. Mose didn’t like to deal with anything concerning Daddy. We got to go back, I tell him. We got to. I’m jerking at the steering wheel. So we circle back — and there it is. I was not dreaming. Even Mose can see whose truck it is. He doesn’t even try to talk me out of seeing what I see. We pull up in Mother’s old station wagon and park right alongside Daddy’s truck. Some kind of psychiatrist, he could probably make something big out of a moment like that — the family station wagon easing up beside the parked truck. There is not a light on anywhere except for the blink of the Vacancy sign at the front of the motel. It is a tacky motel too.”

  “You said that,” Courtney told him.

  “Right. So right off I know what is going on — my blood does — but I’m trying not to believe it. I’m saying hell no, not Daddy. Not the deacon of Hinds County Primitive Baptist — moral compass of our happy family. This ain’t right. No way. It had never crossed my mind that Daddy was the sort to break one of the Ten Commandments. Wasn’t he the one that hung that Ten Commandment plaque in the kitchen right over the door so you had to see it every time you came and went from the house? I’m thinking I will kill his sorry ass and stuff like that. You know, thoughts of a hotheaded sixteen-year-old kid.” He glanced at Arnold. “Not every sixteen-year-old. Just myself, at sixteen. I jump out of the station wagon and run over there and pound on the door of number fourteen like a madman. Mose tries to stop me, to make me get back in the car, but he can’t do it. I’m shouting, ‘Daddy, I know you’re in there! Come out here or I’ll break this door down. I’ll wake up everybody in this godforsaken hellhole.’ That’s how I was talking. That and worse. And finally, after I threaten him that I’ll run through the motel room wall with Mother’s station wagon if he doesn’t open the door — he gives up, I guess. He knows I’m not going away quietly. I yell for him to call the cops — I beg him to. ‘Call the damn cops,’ I scream.”

  “Lord, Truely.” Courtney seemed disbelieving.

  “Do he come out?” Arnold asks.

  “He comes out. Oh, he comes out. He sticks his head out the door like maybe he can talk some reason to me. He’s slung on his pants and his unbuttoned shirt and patted down his hair and is trying to wave me to quiet down — like maybe he doesn’t want to wake up the other so-called guests of this fine Southern establishment. So I seize the moment. I just bust inside the door — into his room. I’m swinging my fists at him and calling him every lowlife name I know. I guess I was trying to protect our mother’s honor or something. That’s how I was feeling. I catch him on the chin one good time. I was playing ball back then, working out a lot, and I was pretty strong for a kid. Besides I had waked him out of a contented sleep I guess. He was sort of in shock. I smacked him as hard as I could and he went to the ground. While he was trying to get up and go back at me — I looked over and saw what I was afraid I would see. A woman. I knew her too. She was a teacher at my school.”

  “Oh, my God,” Courtney whispered.

  “By now I am crying, swinging my fists. It was like I went crazy. Daddy couldn’t get me off him, so Mose comes and he pulls us apart and he about has to beat the hell out of me himself just to get me to stop. He drags me back to the station wagon and sort of throws me in. He’s pissed off that I made a scene like that — with him, a black guy, along — because you know, back then, if there was ever any trouble and a black guy was around? Anyway, now Mose is mad and half scared himself — out in the middle of nowhere at a white motel like that. He tries to slap some sense into me since talking sense won’t work. I finally give up and stop fighting. I just lie back in the passenger seat of that station wagon like a dead man and we drive all the way back to Hinds County that night. Get there in the early morning. We don’t speak a word either, not one. And then … after that …”

  “What?” Arnold asked.

  “Then after that — nothing was ever the same again.”

  “My God, True,” Courtney whispered. “I never knew you got in a fight with Daddy.”

  “That’s why they call them secrets,” Truely said. “People don’t know.” He drank some of his wine. He couldn’t believe he had just done what he had done. Carried a secret on his back for most of his life, then suddenly, because his troubled sister had insisted, had dared him, laid it down once and for all — right at her feet too. Hadn’t he intended for her to never know? Wasn’t that what he’d told himself all these years? He finished his wine and got more.

  “Y’all’s family messed up,” Arnold said. “I never knew y’all’s family was messed up.”

  “It’s a family, isn’t it?” Courtney said. “Or, it used to be a family.”

  “I always think y’all’s family like some of those Sound of Music people. You ever see The Sound of Music? All them white people do is smile and sing. My grandmama love that movie.”

  “We tried to be Sound of Music people,” Courtney said. “God knows.”

  “The point is I was a kid. I overreacted,” Truely said. “It was like Mother and Daddy were always telling me the world was flat and then out of nowhere I see for myself that the world is round — just round and fragile as an inflatable beach ball — and spinning fast — and we’re all about to fall off of it too. Like that.”

  Courtney did not ask him a million questions. Not like he expected. She was biding her time, he guessed. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thanks, True,” she said. “I appreciate your telling me that. I never knew you knew about Mrs. Seacrest. Mama swore she didn’t think you knew — and never wanted you to.”

  “Mama? S
he knew?”

  “She’s the one that told me,” Courtney said. “She made me promise not to tell you. She never wanted you to be disappointed in Daddy, you know?”

  “So, all those years afterward?”

  “I don’t know,” Courtney said. “I guess they worked it out.”

  “She forgave him?”

  “Who knows?” Courtney said. “We’ll have plenty to wonder about for the rest of our lives, right?”

  “Can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he said.

  “Okay, then.” Arnold shook his head. “Man, I didn’t know Truely have it in him. A confession like that. Now that right there gon be damn hard to beat, but I believe I can beat it.”

  “Oh, so it’s a contest,” Truely said. “Now you tell me.”

  “It’s not a contest,” Courtney insisted.

  Truely could feel her intent gaze on him, a softened version that he wasn’t sure he liked.

  “Here’s what I got to say,” Arnold began. “I won’t try to turn it into no interesting story or none of that. It’s just the facts and the facts ain’t never been told until now.”

  “So shoot.” Truely didn’t know how appropriate his word choice was.

  “I told y’all that I never much knew my old man, right? I told y’all that when I was a kid he got shot and I don’t hardly remember nothing about him, right?”

  “You told us,” Truely said.

  “I was maybe six or seven. Had just started going to school and stuff. Vonnie was maybe two or three is all. My old man and my mama, they’re high, right? I mean, I didn’t know to say that back then, I was just a kid and they were just them. But this one night they were fighting real bad. I used to wake up and wet the bed when they got started fighting. Then, along with the rest of it, my mama would go on and whip me for wetting the bed — so I was pretty much in for it, one way or another, every time they got a fight going. So it was mostly true when I said my old man got shot in a drug deal gone bad — but what I never did tell nobody was that my mama was the one that shot him.”