Bonita Faye

by Margaret Moseley

  “There’s another dead one out here,” one of the deputies called when he fell over Paul Watts’s body in the woods.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” was all anyone else could say.

  Harmon was a real, genuine, honest-to-God hero.

  It was late the next morning before I heard from him. Well, there was a phone call. “I’m all right, Bonita Faye. Just cold and tired. I’ll be there when I can. I love you.”

  I put up Billy Roy’s shotgun. And laid down on the sofa with an afghan around me. And waited for Harmon Adams.

  When he come, he was dirty and smelly and needed a shave. His near-beard rubbed my face raw and his kisses tasted like old coffee, cigarettes and a little whiskey. We made love for the first time right then and there on my sofa in the middle of the morning the day after he became the hero of the state of Oklahoma.

  I never asked him about his soul or how he dealt with killing four men. Just like I never asked him that same question when he was sent home from Korea, wounded, but decorated to within an inch of his life with medals across his chest.

  The newspapers called him “a double hero,” but all Harmon ever said to me about it was one day when we were walking down one of my favorite country lanes. I was just slogging along and he was leaning on his cane and he said right out of the blue, “Bonita Faye, I hope I never have to kill anybody again…ever.”

  Bless Harmon, he never did have to kill again.

  ELEVEN

  It was when I was out there in God’s country of Glorieta, New Mexico, U.S.A., that I learned how to write postcards. I’d never sent or received one piece of mail in my life and when I was told I had to send a postcard every day back to my mama, it scared me. Who was I to be dealing with the United States Post Office?

  Well, sir, they just marched us down to the big hall and made us buy a dime’s worth of them penny postcards to send back. Once I got in the spirit of it, I had fun choosing different scenes of Glorieta Baptist Encampment and Surrounding Area. First I sent Mama one that had the Welcome to Glorieta Baptist Encampment sign on it. And then, when I found out they wouldn’t get you for it, I began to draw little arrows on the picture side to show Mama, “I was here.” Or, “I sleep in this cabin.”

  The writing side came more difficult. First off I just said, “Mama, the good Lord got us safe here. Amen. Bonita Faye.”

  I may be slow, but I have never been called stupid, ‘cept by Billy Roy and he’s dead. And a couple of other times that I didn’t pay no never mind to.

  Time we left Glorieta I had spent another ten cents on postcards and was virtually scrawling books on the left-hand side reserved for writing.

  “Dear Mama, I had fun today. I drawed my sword first in Bible Drill and got another blue ribbon. I’m saving it for to show you with my collection of tree leaves. Did you know every blasted tree has different leaves? All are my favorite. We have Kool-aid and vanilla wavers every snack. I’m in love with Jimmy Lawrence. So is all the girls. When I’m not having fun, I cry about him. I also love the Lord. And you. Bonita Faye.”

  I had so much to tell Mama and so little space to do it in that the words were tiny and scrunched up and my signature finally became just a “BF” way down in the corner, spilling over into the address part. I worried about that. I thought the United States Post Office might get me for writing on their side.

  Never having heard of a diary, I was surprised at the reaction I had when I got home and found all my postcards. Mama had tied them together with a piece of packing string and when I untied them the pictures and the words came tumbling into my hands. The days I had spent, the things I had done and the things I had felt all came back to me just like I was there in Glorieta again.

  Simple words brought back tastes and sounds. Never again would I ever drink Kool-aid without a side dish of vanilla wafers. Never again would I hear the wind in the trees without thinking about the individual leaves that sprang from their branches. I think the yearly ritual I’ve followed all my life of saying, “Thank you, thank you and thank you” to the changing leaves in the fall started with that trip to New Mexico. To this day I am amazed and feel somewhat guilty about the individuality of leaves on a tree.

  Mama knew how much I loved my postcards and she sent me one every chance she could. Now she didn’t go nowhere to send one ‘cept once to Mena and once to Fort Smith. But she’d go sometimes to our very own post office and send me one right there from home. I still have them. “Dear Bonita Faye. You are a good gurl. Be good. Mama.”

  When I arrived in Paris, France, I thought I was in postcard heaven. I sent postcards to Harmon off in Korea, to Patsy and her husband, Jerry, and their dog, Flop. I sent one to Sheriff Hoyle and his gray-serge wife, Berta. I sent one to everyone who ever nodded “howdy” to me in my lifetime. I even sent one to Miss Dorothy. How do you like them apples?

  They had postcards of the Eiffel Tower taken every which way from Christmas and of Notre Dame and, of course, the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysees. And they had postcards of pictures people had painted. Pictures that I could see for real in the Paris art museums. Imagine having to go all the way to Paris, France, to see your very first person-painted picture.

  Every morning I would go down to the sidewalk cafe around the corner from my hotel and take the stack of postcards that I had bought the day before on my afternoon tour. I learned to order coffee if it was before noon and a glass of wine if it was after. I would sip my coffee, never really coming to like the little cups that Harmon would have called “panther piss,” and I would write my postcards right there on the Champs-Elysees.

  I always sat at the same table and always had the same waiter. A dark, slender young man in a short white coat. “Un cafe,” I would say. Or “Un vin rouge.” I’m sorry to say that was about it. I could get around Paris, but as great as it felt being on my own, I was also hampered in what I could do and more importantly eat, because of my lack of the language.

  A body could look at those English-French phrase guides all day, but knowing that “J’aimerais des pommes de terre,” meant “I want some of them potatoes,” didn’t mean I was going to get them. If there was a written menu, I’d just point while trying to remember that although fish was “poisson,” it wasn’t really poison.

  It was a funny feeling, being around hundreds of people every day, but never being able to talk to them. I felt like I was in a pharmacist’s jellied capsule, closed away from everybody even when I was right in the midst of them. I could see them, hear them, even touch if I wanted to, but they went on with their lives just like I wasn’t there. Their conversation and their emotions just swirled around my isolation. Like I had died and some part of me had come back to sit at that white-clothed sidewalk cafe table in the heart of Paris, France, where I would sit forever not quite knowing what was going on, not quite being a part of life.

  My young waiter tried. One day I was so hungry, I just looked at him and said, “For God’s sake, please bring me a cheese sandwich before I up and die of hunger.” When he just stood there with a frustrated look on his handsome face, I said in desperation, saying more French than I ever had before, “Fromage. Fromage with pain.”

  You could tell when the sun came shining through. His brown eyes lit up like dime store candles and he grinned. “Oh, le croque-monsieur. Avec le jambon?”

  “Jambon?”

  “Oui, jambon.” He looked around at the other tables, lowered his head to mine and whispered in my ear. “Oink, oink.”

  We looked in each other’s eyes, close together because of his previous gesture. Youth and humor won out. “Oui, oink, oink. And while you’re at it,” I added, “I want a Coca-Cola, too.”

  Coca-Cola is, always has been and always will be the same in any language.

  It was a toss-up, who was more delighted with that first meal I ever ordered in French. Me or the waiter. I had two of them cheese sandwiches with ham. An
d three Coca-Colas. The bread was toasted, the cheese gooey and more white than yellow and the ham was paper thin. To this day I have a weakness for Croquet Monsieur.

  As I was brushing away the toast crumbs after finishing my second one, my lovely waiter rushed over and scolded me. “Non, non. S’il vous plaît.” And he whisked out a little bone-handled brush and swept away the crumbs. Then he disappeared into the shop to return with what looked like a long donut with gorgeous chocolate on top. “Le dessert.” It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw him give a tiny flourish to his presentation of the unexpected treat. He stood beside me, head lowered, while I bit into the fudge sweet. We both laughed when I was surprised at the first taste of the creamy white center hidden inside. “Éclair,” he said proudly.

  “Éclair,” I parroted. Then, “God, this is good. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh, no, I mean, merci, merci, merci.” I know I said it like, “mercy, mercy, mercy,” but he understood. My capsule had disolved a little. I was in Paris, France. I was sitting at my own table on the Champs-Elysees. I could find food to stay alive. I could make a friend.

  He was a little confused when I then asked for “un cafe.” It was almost like we were back at square one. “Deux desserts, mademoiselle?” It was months before I realized the French thought coffee was a dessert, not an accompaniment to one or a luxury to be enjoyed after.

  I held my own. “Un cafe,” I repeated.

  “Oui, mademoiselle.” With efficiency, albeit with faint disapproval, he appeared again with a small cup of panther piss.

  I pulled out my postcards, selected one with Mona Lisa on the picture side and started a note to Patsy. I had just gotten to the “oink, oink” story when I saw a small gray bug skittering across the tablecloth in search of stray crumbs. My waiter, who had hovered at my elbow, actually looking over my shoulder at what I was writing, was horrified. He reached for his little crumb brush and swept the offender away. We both looked down where it was scurrying away into a crack in the sidewalk. The waiter aimed the toe of his heavy black boot at it.

  “No, no. Don’t kill it. It’s only a little ol’ sour bug.” I grabbed at his descending foot, throwing him off balance. I just can’t stand to see innocent things killed, especially on my account. My young man grabbed at the edge of the table, pulling the cloth half-way off, to keep his balance. “Pardon, mademoiselle,” he said with as much dignity as he could under the circumstances as he walked away.

  I looked around. It was late in the afternoon and I was the only customer. I gathered up my postcards, wiped the wet coffee off the “Dear Patsy, Jerry and Flop,” part of the Mona Lisa one and jammed them into my purse. I pulled francs out of my wallet, even I knew there were too many, and dropped them on the table as I rose.

  A finely structured tanned hand appeared on my shoulder, pushing me gently back into my chair. “Non, non.” My waiter stood there with another cup of coffee. He put it down on the table while he picked up the spilled one and he spoke to me in English, probably the first he had ever said, “I am sor-rey. I am Claude.”

  TWELVE

  If you ever do anything really drastic to change your life…like commit murder…I sure can recommend a visit to Paris, France, to help you through that time before you reenter the world where people don’t commit murder. Now you may not actually be able to get to Paris, or even like the idea of going there, but the important thing is to always have a Paris, France, in your head; a spot that is solely yours—like Paris was mine. A carrot on a stick. A destination that no matter whatever happens to you, you’ll be safe there. Some people, I understand, think of heaven in that way.

  I first latched on to Paris, France, as my banner for escape when I was fourteen and my step-father raped me on the dirty, discarded sofa in the Swans’ attic. While he was doing his business with me, I rolled my head back over the sofa’s edge and looked at a red, white and blue flag that had the words Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité stitched on it in gold thread.

  Later I took Little Alice Swan up to the attic and asked her what the flag was, what the words meant. “Oh, Bonita Faye, I swear, sometimes I think you don’t know anything. That’s the flag of France and those are the French words for freedom. You stupid girl, don’t you know about Paris? The capital of France? That’s where they have the kings and queens and everyone is equal. And they have the prettiest women in the world and the handsomest men who all kiss your hand.” The little innocent lowered her voice. “And they all drink wine instead of water…even the children. And all they eat is chocolate and all they wear is silk.”

  The next person who dared to call me stupid would die. I hated it when Little Alice knew something I didn’t.

  When Mama and I left the Swans’, it was in the dark of the night so we could sneak away from the no-account Mama had married while I was in Glorieta, New Mexico…an unexpected surprise when I got back from Bible camp. Before me and Mama slipped out the back door of the big house, I crept up the back stairs to the attic and took that dusty old flag off the wall, rolled it up around its black stick and stuck it in the paper sack that was my suitcase. Until Billy Roy gave me my real Paris nightgown, it was the only thing I actually had from France.

  Knowing that there was such a place as Paris, France, and thinking about it all the time is a lot different than truly going there.

  Not that I didn’t like it there. I did. It was just different at first than I had dreamed, but I was some excited when after hours of standing in line in a big gray building that reminded me of the auction barns back home, waiting to go through customs, I finally stood on a real French street with my new suitcase in my hand.

  “Taxi, mademoiselle?” A small man with a black cloth beret reached for my suitcase. I jerked the case back and then held it out to him when I saw his taxi at the curb.

  In the cab, he turned in the front seat and said a lot of something that I didn’t understand. I think he was asking me where I wanted to go. Then it hit me. I didn’t know. My game plan had been to get to Paris, France, not to be, in fact, in it.

  My driver became impatient and agitated, almost angry. I started to cry and that’s when I first learned what softies the French could be. Immediately, he reached a hand out over the seat and patted my arm. He slowed down his speech and finally I understood a word.

  “Yes. Hotel. I want to go to a hotel.”

  The driver said, “Bien” which I knew was “good.” We smiled. Then he started in again with a bunch of other gobbledy-gook words. I knew he was asking me “Which hotel?” but I didn’t know.

  Tears again.

  I said the only French words I knew or at least could remember at the time.

  “Champs-Elysees. I want to go to the Champs-Elysees.”

  Again his eyes revealed acknowledgment. Then slowly he asked, “Res-er-vation?”

  I was so glad Little Alice wasn’t there to know how stupid I was not to have made a reservation. But then I had never stayed at a hotel and didn’t know a reservation was necessary. And I thought how stupid it was not to even know the name of one.

  I said again, “Champs-Elysees.”

  We stared at each other over the front seat for several minutes. Then he nodded and turned in his seat, started the taxi and pulled out into the traffic. He said a lot more of the French words as he made a u-turn, but the only one I understood was “Champs-Elysees.” Only he didn’t say it quite like I did. I said it like “Elly sees.”

  There I was, Bonita Faye Burnett, in a taxi, in the real Paris, France, driving down the Champs-Elysees, just like I always knew I would.

  One of the reasons I knew back then that I was squared away with my soul about Billy Roy’s murder is I had heard at Glorieta that God sends angels to protect the innocent and there’s no doubt that Denis Denfert was sent to me that day by Divine guidance, to be my taxi driver and to deliver me safe to his cousin’s hotel around the corner from the Champs-Elyse
es. Since I was no innocent in any sense of the word, I must have been “made new” somewhere along the line to receive such blessings ‘cause if you’re thinkin’ that I fit into Paris like a cold hand in a winter glove then I’ve left something out.

  Could be I didn’t explain enough about how tired I was and that noisy, never-ending plane trip—I had to stay awake the whole time to keep the plane up in the air—it didn’t help none. And the time change, good law, it was day when I left America and it was day when I got to France and nobody ever told me what happened to the night.

  So when my taxi driver’s cousin—only I didn’t know that’s who he was when he led me into the hotel—took me to this fancy, high-ceilinged room, I just fell over on the bed and didn’t move until night had come and gone and when I woke to sunlight coming through the window, I thought maybe that was why they called Paris “the city of lights.” That maybe it never was night in France and why hadn’t I read about that?

  I still had on my shoes, but someone had covered me with a white light-as-a-feather quilt which was so snugly warm that I wanted to close my eyes and go back to sleep. But a woman in a black uniform knocked on my door and came on in without so much as a “by your leave.” I hoped she was the one who had covered me up and reckoned I was right ‘cause she acted like she was trying to take care of me. She had brought in a shiny tray of what I hoped was coffee, but turned out to be a hot black liquid that was so dark, thick and bitter that it looked like had been brewed from the mud and some of the weeds that grow down by the banks of the Poteau River.

  “I thank you very much,” I told her, “But I’d like some coffee. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Oui, cafe,” she said.