Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  “That F Stop has me tabulating production quotas for his freakin armadillo ranch,” she complained to Joe. “It’s got my mind filled to the horizons with them ugly little things fucking away for America’s dogdom. Can you call the old man off?”

  As she spoke, Joe spotted Earl taking a seat a dozen rows down. His ambiguous gaze snagged Joe’s up the crowded slope of heads, blue flashing remonstrance, gray charged subtly with guilt. Joe shook his head tightly; he was still enraged with the old fool. Earl snapped his head away and sat by Bony Maroney.

  “Earl and I arent speaking,” he told Fraulein.

  “Gracious!” Carmen exclaimed. “You sound like a couple of dueling dragqueens.”

  “You callin me a fruitcake?” Joe challenged in jest.

  “I aint callin you anything,” huffed Carmen. “But the last time we kissed I opened my eyes and you had yours shut.”

  Fraulein went on: “I asked F Stop once, ‘Have you ever actually fed a dog armadillo meat?’ And he says, ‘No,’ and I say, ‘How do you know they even like the stuff?’ And you know what the old fool does? Taps his bean and says he had a vision …”

  “Armadillos, army dildos,” Carmen closed the topic.

  Joe wasn’t alone in liking these old queens. Their hearts were big as churches, their belly laughs could fill circus tents. Their popularity hinged in part on their no longer being in the sexual arena. Younger queens could befriend them without fear of competition; straight cons could play the fool around them without fear of having their bluffs called. Joe enjoyed their bawdy repartee—in small doses.

  “Joe,” Fraulein tugged his sleeve and husked in a voice ripe with reefer, “Carmen’s got a new hustle. The old sow’s been overordering Lidocaine and Procaine, local anesthetics used in Dental. She’s been selling them on the line for StaHard erection cream.”

  “Look!” cried Carmen, pointing an arm dripping suety flesh. “Here comes Will Clay with that tramp Agnes of Awful. Doesnt he know while he’s out buffin his chest muscles on the Yard, she’s on the wing buffin love muscles? … Oooh! There’s Aunt Jemima this fine evening with her cumdrunk grin. Did you know that coon queen’s takin it from Dr. Starkowitz, Chief of Psychiatric Sevices? Now would La Memoranda tell a lie? …” The Gym P.A. thumped Marvin Gaye’s tribal aria to the perennial lasttoknows, “I Heard It through the Grapevine.”

  When Fraulein saw Billy Skaggs make his entrance with Angelfood riding his leg, Joe thought she’d faint. “My God, he’s marrying Magdalena in the Catholic Chapel in a month. Must he make a spectacle of his infidelity?”

  “Why marry Magdalena twice?” asked Joe.

  “Oh, this time it’s legal. Havent you heard? When she paroled, Magdalena had the sex change operation at Stanford Medical Center, she’s tucked and rolled, a genuine woman. Goodness, did the Visiting Room guards hate having to let her use the ladiesroom. The Warden’s bound by law to let them get married just like any other man and woman. They’re fifth on the Catholic Chaplain’s list … Although I cant for the life of me imagine why he’d want to tie the knot with that tramp.”

  Carmen said, “You’re just jealous, you old cocksucker.”

  “Jealous?” Fraulein’s hand fluttered to her bosom like a wingshot bird. “You think I lust to lie with the beasts of the field? Shame on you, Miss Thing.”

  “Where’s Oblivia?” Joe asked casually. He’d missed her usual grand entrance on the arm of Coldwater’s most recent heartthrob.

  Carmen turned earnest. “She holds orientation for fish queens Saturday nights, when most of the guards are busy watching the movie and Darth Vader’s offduty.”

  “What’s the movie?” Joe asked to keep from thinking of McGee, wondering when he’d make his move for the Moon.

  “Something called Below the Belt,” Carmen said.

  “Here I was hoping to put my mind on hold,” Joe said, “and they slip us an intellectual exercise.”

  “What fun!” Fraulein clapped her hands. “Will there be a quiz afterwards?”

  Wearily Carmen honked, “In the showers, Myrtle.”

  The lights dimmed, the rock faded; the parachute draped flat against the far wall flickered to life … An electronic throbbing insistent as a lifesupport system accompanying bloodred credits flowing from beneath the chrome rear bumper of a ’58 Impala streaking down an absolutely straight twolane blacktop. The camera halts when the credits are finished; the car speeds off, becoming a speck on the featureless horizon … Cut … A dark and crowded roadhouse, Brenda Lee pining “I’m Sorry” from the juke, laughter, the clink of ice in glasses. A loner with face like a closeup of lunar lava stands at the bar cooling his brow by rolling a cold tallboy of beer across it. A flash of sunlight, a stranger appears with something wrapped in oily rags; approaches the loner and says, “Here, Lucy said it yours. Bury it or pickle it or have it for lunch.” He sets it on the bar and unravels the rags to reveal a shriveled blue fetus … The Coldwater Gymnasium erupted in riotous cheering, whistling, and bleacherstomping for kindred loser spirits immortalized on celluloid.

  SCENE TWO: a raunchy motel room with broken venetian blinds and racketing airconditioning … A man lying on the chintz bedspread loosely aiming a large caliber revolver at a bosomy blonde starting to strip at the foot of the bed. She’s wriggling up her tube top, one boob bobbles free … Wait a minute! It looks like someone just spread vaseline on the lens.

  “Picture!” Several convicts cried at once; another screamed: “Projectionist motherfucker. Focus!” But the picture only worsened; now three blurry blondes are shaking six fuzzy leche bags. Everyone joined in the screaming for the projectionist. After all, this was the inmates’ cultural issue being fucked with. Then the film froze; the lamp scorched a hole beginning with the tits and burning outward until the screen went white. Pandemonium erupted.

  In from the Mainline rushed a gang of guards accompanied by a lieutenant Joe didnt recognize. He bounded down the bleacher steps, struck parade rest at the center of the Gym, facing upward over the writhing frieze of convict ire, and shouted: “Silence! Stop stomping the bleachers!”

  The convicts turned their racket down halfway. The lieutenant ordered his men to knock on the projection booth door directly behind Joe. No answer. He ordered them to break it down. The guards took turns kicking until it splintered and crashed inward. They ran up the stairs.

  A moment later one of them returned and with a red face motioned the lieutenant to follow him back up. The lieutenant descended the stairs and grimly snatched up the wall phone. A gravelly voice over the P.A. ordered the convicts to return to their units for Emergency Count.

  It had to be one of the guards who spilled the beans. The word spread like prairie fire as the convicts filed out of the gym and down the Mainline.

  “Goddam projectionist escaped!” “What?” “Busted a hole in the ceiling with a piece of angle iron and went out over the roof.” “But the guntowers! …” “Take a look out the window. Fog’s thicker than soup. All they do is sleep in them towers anyway.” “That boy’s gone like a turkey through the corn.”

  After Lights Joe uncapped a Maxwell House coffee jar of pruno, as prison hootch was called. He’d bought it from the Bakery, who had the lock on the prison’s yeast supply. Flicking on his radio, he tipped back his head and drank. The first slug torched his throat, the second flamed his gut like a forge. It was the fourth and fifth that set the cell to gently rocking, and Joe fell back on his moonsplashed bunk, yodeling along with a Christian cowpoke over the airwaves about a couple of other dudes in big fixes

  You delivered Daniel from the lion’s den

  Sprung Jonah from the belly of the whale

  I’m askin Lord, askin once again

  When you gonna go my bail?

  SALLY GO ROUND THE ROSES

  The only place Kitty remembered being unafraid as a child was Mama’s kitchen in the little whitewashed hous
e off the coastal road on Galveston Island. There the little girl liked sitting on the windowseat beside the big black wood table, amid the warm smells of corn tortillas and roasting carne asada and beans, always beans; watching Mama move with plain and placid surety within the rustling of her bulky black skirts, from cast iron stove to sink to flourdusted counter and back to the stove; wondering at her blunt mestiza fingers blurring like drumsticks beating out tortillas and sculpting tostada crusts and spinning out of modest sugar and flour and the occasional egg elaborate pan dulces commemorating obscure saints; listening to the sizzling oil and the faint metered susurration of the Gulf and Mama softly singing deep in her throat malaguenas, folk laments from her native Nuevo Leon. Next to praying, Mama was best at cooking; she lived somewhere along the nexus joining these two sustaining ceremonies of her existence, the one spiritual and other secular; without either Mama would surely wither and blow away like one of the dry translucent shrimp shells littering the nearby beach. So next to church, the child sensed her mother was closest to contentment in la cocina, what contentment this world offered to her for whom suffering was a birthright, an ancestral and ineluctable and sacred precondition of existence as essential to salvation as the death to deliver her thereto.

  “Shitfire!” Kitty more than once exclaimed to her Aunt Juanita, who was a waitress at the Silver Peso where Mama cooked parttime, “When Mama kicks the bucket, ole Saint Pete’s gonna shunt her into the express lane cuz she’s got credit for time served in Purgatory ten times over right here on the Island.”

  Now she sat again in the windowseat behind the heavy black table watching Mama; again in the drowsy and fetuslike state within the whitewashed womb of familiar warm smells and sounds. Only now she sprawled, splayed legs supporting her hugely domed belly. And now the child’s secret abstract smile was replaced by that of a woman fulfilled; the enigmatic primal halfsmile of the eternal matrix knowing yet once more the species is saved from extinction, granted one more reprieve of three score and ten years through the sole and exclusive agency of her uterus.

  “Mama, this brings back memories.”

  Mama was grinding corn on the flat stone beside the stove. A gritty scrunching sound slowly softening until she stopped and threw another handful of kernels beneath the hardwood spindle.

  “Many years, many tears. Eh, baby?” Despite her propriety and abject sanctity, Mama still spoke English like a bordertown B-girl.

  “Not so many tears here in la cocina, Mama.” Kitty shifted to peer out the window. Across the coast road she could see the shallow Gulf breakers advancing on the dirty beach in staggered ranks. Down the road blue neon tubing in the shape of a Mexican flaked out against a cactus with his sombrero pulled down over his face marked the place of Mama’s employment since Papa had the stroke and was sent to the home on the mainland.

  “You still think about him, baby?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “So young to die … such a good boy.”

  “Not him, Mama. Jesus! …” She was talking about that lunkhead she married to cover up for Papa.

  “Not in this house you dont swear, baby. You know my heart cant bear it. The doctor told me I shouldnt even be working. But unless I give up all the social security check, the government wont pay the rest of Papa’s ticket at the home. I ask the men in suits, I beg. I say I sick, too. No way, baby, they say. So dont swear in my house or I drop dead. Eh, baby?”

  “No. I mean, yes. Oh, whatever floats your boat, Mama.”

  “What boat you talkin about, baby?”

  Kitty sighed. “No swearin, mama. Only just dont act like Joe’s someone I dreamed. He’s alive. Right inside me now. It’s him I think about. It’s him I’m goin to.”

  Mama dropped her spindle, dusted her hands smartly, and stepped to a convenient statuette of the Virgin on a wall pedestal. She crossed herself and hissed fervently for a moment.

  Kitty waited until she was finished and had started grinding again, then said softly, “Mama, he’s a good man.”

  Mama ground harder and began moaning a lugubrious cancion.

  “Mama!”

  “Yes, baby,” still singing, grinding her daughter’s heart.

  “I said he’s a good man.” God, how she wanted to say better than Papa ever even wanted to be, how she wanted to throw all his violent drinking and philandering and thieving right in her face, even the terrible secret. Or was it a secret? Mama had to know. She only believed herself absolved of the knowing by her furious pagan devotion, as though the shining of her piety could blind God to the abomination of her own house.

  “What good man goes to jail? Eh, baby?” she asked finally.

  The nerve. Really the fucking nerve. As though there wasn’t a bunk in the downtown clink with Papa’s name practically inscribed on it.

  “He’s good to me.”

  “Sure, he’s good to you, baby. But … el niño?”

  “It’s his. He’ll know it. I’m certain. Know it and claim it and cherish it and provide for it. All those good things.”

  Mama finished grinding and rinsed off her spindle. She hung it from a wall bracket and turned, drying her square hands on her apron to face Kitty with those drawn black eyes in which suffering shone like a virtue.

  “Baby, you know men like that dont never do the right thing. Out of all the sin of your living I hoped you’d learned at least that. I know what you been doin. You’ve know many men and I betcha baby I lit a candle for every one. You know how they do, men. Eh, baby?”

  “Mama, I believe in Joe. Okay? I believe … Didnt you ever believe in someone …”

  “Sure, baby.” Mama turned to find something else to do, another cooking chore to defend herself. “Sure.”

  Kitty knew then Mama was beyond belief in fallible flesh. There were a couple before Papa, and then maybe she thought she believed in him when he had to marry her or fight her brothers because she was carrying Kitty. She delivered prematurely, after Papa beat her in a drunken rage for having had to marry, the connubial curse by which fate fettered him; beat her so severely the doctors told her to try again was to die and she brought her baby home to a house already bereft of love and now, too, its charade proscribed. Took the baby with her to her own barren bed because Papa had smashed the cursed cradle for kindling to beat her. That night wouldn’t be the last he didn’t come home, not by a thousand. It was then Mama swore her life to the Virgin, and Papa, his to a stewardship in the Devil’s own wineshop. When Mama abjured earthly love, belief in flesh became apostasy and a renunciation of her jealous faith.

  After a moment, Mama said, “Will you take it to the home, baby?”

  “To him? Mama, dont ask me that,” Kitty warned. His presence invaded the room just as surely as when he would burst in drunk and thrash Mama, way back when Kitty still was small enough to hide beneath the table.

  “It would mean something to him.” She was seated across the table from her daughter now, cutting crepe paper to weave flowers for the navidad.

  “I’m tired, Mama. I’m going upstairs.”

  “I’m tired, too, baby.”

  “What you got in the oven?”

  “Pan gloria.”

  “It smells about done. Dont let it burn.”

  Mama tied a red camelia without answering.

  It was the same room, only smaller, the way all rooms are smaller when revisited by the children who once inhabited them. The same cerise cafe curtains on the dormer windows with the same desiccated insect husks between the screen and frame rattling minutely when the wind scudded off the Gulf. The same floralprint wallpaper, a little more curled and yellowed along the seams; the same corny print of a mare and foal, the same crucifix dangling the same gory Christ; the same pine floorboards, whose creaky warps she knew so intimately that she could play “Sally Go Round the Roses” with her bare toes. The same shutup smell of camphor balls and Catholic school mis
sals and old varnish. Everything the same, only shrunken to a degree perhaps commensurate with the unexpectedly trivial significance that this, her former world, now held for Kitty.

  Only one thing was unshrunken, unbrittled, unreduced by time: the vow she’d made on a winter evening much like this one, lying just as she was now with a life awake in her belly. Only then it was the monster that kicked and squirmed and soured her milk, the incarnation of the perverse impulse that spawned it; and she knew she was bringing it forth only to destroy it. She vowed to that same cramped dark ceiling that one day her body would bring forth life, not something only living; would create instead of a screaming image of hate and evil, a symbol of adoration and wonder, love itself. That was her vow, and it had lived these years, awaiting her in that room.

  “Any day now,” she hummed the words to the oldie. That’s what the doctor said. Already it was two weeks late but the doctor said not to worry and she hoped it might wait another ten days. The hospital had a sort of sweepstakes, which would pay the complete delivery expenses of the new year’s first baby. That way she could save the last of Dan’s ten grand she’d set aside for medical expenses, give her and Joe and the baby a little startup stake. She reached in her blouse and touched a leaking nipple and transferred the bluewhite juice to her tongue. It tasted sweet and tart both, like new elderberry wine.

  Perhaps the charge of sheer joy jumpstarted her womb. The first contraction sprung tears to her eyes; she forgot what the little booklets in doctor’s office said and held her breath. The next loosed a cry, but she remembered to breathe deep and count. When it subsided she called out for Mama. No answer. She swung her feet off her childhood bed and that’s when the third hit, only now she was ready for it. They were coming so fast she knew it was time.