So Dad was there, waiting for the paper which Junior delivered and they’d divide it up, tiptoeing around, whispering, folding it with care so as not to make noise and then settling down to get the bad news of the day. Our bad news wasn’t found on the front pages, but in the want-ads. If there was something in the Male Wanted section that Dad could possibly fill—gas station attendant, short-order cook, delivery-truck driver—he’d light out immediately after he and Junior had found the address on a city map. Mom would go through the paper again more thoroughly when she got up. There would then be the long morning wait for Dad’s telephone call or return. It was always the latter—the job had been filled yesterday; he hadn’t enough experience as a chef (Woody’s Cafe didn’t seem to count for much); didn’t have an Arizona State driver’s license. Or something. Always something.
“We don’t have any money at all,” Junior told me. “Absolutely none. We’re still waiting for some money from the auction in Galena and that won’t get here until God knows when. We can’t go on living off Aunt Dell. All we have is what Mom makes in that… night club.” He spat out the words as though it were a whore house.
“But we only just got here …”
“Yeah. Have you looked at the want-ads? There aren’t any jobs, Totsy. I wish you’d pay a little more attention to the … realities.” He raised a hand to shut me up. “If you ask me what that means, I’ll slap you winding …”
“But maybe Mom can …”
“She can’t. She can’t teach here. Oh, there are jobs listed for engineers for the copper mines down in places like A-joe or A-hoe or whatever it’s called, but Dad is not an engineer. Mining or otherwise.”
Junior’s concern was reflected in Dad’s face every day. And Mom’s. Well, everybody was getting pretty depressed as that first week wore on.
Mom continued to work at The Ship with Sister, bringing home an apron-pocket of change that we’d all count out on the kitchen table. One night, $2.65, another $1.98, a $3.46, and her top of $5.75. When we realized that Sister was coming home with twice or three times that amount, Mom had to confess that she hated it about as much as we hated picking cotton.
Every morning was spent scouring the papers—the want-ads were gone over by Dad and Mom, then by Aunt Dell, then by Roy, then by Junior and me. Possibilities were circled. Letters written and rewritten. Phone calls made. After the first week there simply seemed to be some sort of breakdown in communications. Not one answer from our letters had been received. Phone messages left were not returned. The list of jobs in the papers seemed to shrink daily. Mom investigated teaching possibilities. Letters to the State Board of Education had been sent in the hope that she would be eligible for an Arizona teaching credential. Even that seemed to have become snarled up in a tangle of red tape.
Junior came up with a good idea for us after we’d gone through the Sunday papers’ ads. We’d go into business. We’d mow lawns. Well, he would and I’d rake. We cleaned and oiled the old lawn mower in the garage and started out. We were stymied by the “No Peddlers—No Soliciting” signs. How could we get to mow a lawn if we couldn’t talk to anybody?
“Let’s print a sign,” I suggested. “I’ll carry it on a stick like the strikers do, and the people can read from inside their houses. Then we don’t have to ring doorbells or so … solicitize or whatever it is.”
“Solicit, dummy.” Junior grinned. “That ain’t a dumb idea.”
We found an old can of black paint in the garage, that had a crust about an inch thick and hard as cement on the top when we finally got the lid off. We managed to break through the crust with a hammer and chisel to find enough liquid to make our sign. We cut a square off the side of a cardboard box that had “Clabber Girl Baking Powder” printed on the outside, but the inside was perfect for “Lawns Cut (and raked): 25 cents. Any Size.” I wanted to add “Within Reason,” but Junior pointed out that the sign was the come-on and we’d be able to dicker about the price once we’d lured the residents out of their houses. While the paint dried, I decided to go to the big public swimming pool down at the end of Tamarisk Avenue. Sunday was the only day children under twelve were allowed in free. Junior didn’t have the dime he’d have to pay and besides, he was going through the Sunday papers from front to back, “Boning up on Arizona,” he explained.
I was halfway down the driveway, with my towel and swimming trunks under my arm when I heard him call from the screened porch, “Hey. Listen. Y’all shore that white trash don’t have to pay?” I walked on with a back as straight as I could make it.
The changing room smelled of hot bodies, Clorox that Mom used for cleaning, and a bit like the men’s room in the Court House in Galena. I huddled on a bench and wormed out of my short pants and underwear and into the slightly too big, dark blue woolen trunks whose moth-holes had been darned with regular thread making the repairs pucker like sores with the scabs just off.
Glimpses of heavy dangling cocks and balls spilling out of nests of curly hair—resembling the excelsior used in the air-conditioners—were not things of beauty. I’d never seen naked men before.
The water in the pool was like soup and smelled like the changing room. I felt lonely and bored. Even going down the slide was no fun without someone to watch you and wave to. I missed Junior. So much for solitary outings.
“He’s a little upset,” Mom said when I asked where Junior was. “I think he’s out in the garage.”
The garage doors were closed. He surely wouldn’t be in there. I called anyway, to make sure. Nothing. I pushed on the side door but it wouldn’t budge. “Hey, Junior, you in there?” Silence. “Then why is this door, locked?” Still silence. “Come on. Mom says you’re in there. What are you doing for Lord’s sake?”
“Go away.”
“What?”
He screamed. “I said go a-WAY.”
I’d never heard him scream like that. I moved closer to the door and talked softly as though we were standing close together. “What’s the matter? You mad at me? You said you didn’t want to go to the pool.”
“Oh, Tots, please, just go a-way. I don’t want anybody to see me. Not even you.”
“For heaven’s sake!” I was alarmed. This was not like him. “Let me in. What in the world’s the matter with you? Have you got another boil on your neck?” He’d had them before, a series of them one spring and the unsightliness of them bothered him more than the pain. “Looky here. I’ve seen them before. You know that doesn’t bother me.” I waited and listened. I heard him move toward the door and open it slightly.
“OK.” He was hiding behind the door. “Come on in.”
I poked my head around the door, not knowing what to expect.
He was standing stooped over wearing a funny-looking knitted cap. He looked stricken as though he’d either been crying or was about to. “What in God’s name are you wearing that thing for? It’s boiling hot. Have you gone ker-flooie?” I moved forward and reached for the cap. He grabbed my hand in an iron grip.
“Don’t,” he said dangerously. “Don’t touch that cap.”
He had gone ker-flooie. “Well, at least pull it up from your ears. You’ll have a heat stroke or something.”
“I can’t pull it up. That’s the whole point. I’ve got to wear this …” My eyes widened, I was sure he was going to use Dad’s word. And he did. “… fucking cap for the next month. At least.”
“Did you hurt yourself?” That could be the only explanation.
“No. Aunt Dell did.”
“Aunt Dell did what? For Lord’s sake, you’re driving me crazy. What are you talking about?”
He stood perfectly still for several seconds not looking at me so much as through me. Then he slowly lifted both his hands and pulled the hat all the way down over his face and then let out an awful cry of anguish as he ripped it off. “Just look what she’s done,” he wailed.
At first I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then I saw and a great hoot of laughter burst from me before I could control
it. His hair had been cut or rather butchered. It was what we all called the “bowl cut.” It looked as though a bowl had been put on his head and every strand of hair hanging beneath its rim was cut and then the area shaved, leaving a circular crown of hair. It was awful.
“There, you see,” he said accusingly. “Even you laugh at me.”
“I’m sorry. Really I am. It just slipped out. How in the world did it happen?”
“Oh, you know Aunt Dell. She knows how to do everything. And we all thought she knew how to cut hair. She said it was pure robbery to pay twenty-five cents for a haircut. So.”
“So?”
“So, she went at me with a pair of rusty clippers that I swear was used for shearing sheep. About a hundred years ago. I could feel her going up the back of my neck and then before I could open my mouth, I felt the clippers practically on top of my head. She’d cut a broad strip right up behind my ear.” He turned his head sideways for me to see. “Just look at that. See? Right up to here. Then there was nothing to do but try to even it all out. Well, you see what happened. I’m a mess. I look like a worn out mop.” He did, too. We looked at each other for a second and then we both laughed. He choked on his laughter and I thought he was going to cry.
“It’ll grow. Your hair always grows faster than mine. Why in a week …”
“In a week, we’re supposed to be starting school. Well, that is, that’s when school starts here. I’ll be laughed out of the school house …” He was deadly serious now and I realized what he was saying was true. It was going to be difficult enough getting adjusted to a new school filled with people we’ve never even seen and I’d already had enough comments on my accent to know that we were all going to have to battle some sort of prejudice for just being from out-of-state. New kids in school are always the ones to be ganged up on and looking like a worn out mop was not the best way to start out.
“Well, we can’t do anything about it today. It’s Sunday. I know Sister will loan me a quarter and we’ll take you to a regular barber and he’ll even it all up.”
“He’ll have to shave my head to even it all up.”
Nothing I could say could make him leave the garage or take off that terrible cap. He’d decided that the heat generated by the airless room and the wool would perhaps stimulate the growth. I went back to the house promising to bring him something cold to drink.
I got sidetracked by considerable excitement in the kitchen. Mom had gone back over the Sunday ads and found something under “Couples Wanted” that didn’t sound very good, but she’d called on the off chance and talked to a lady called Mrs. Jones who had, Mom said, a southern accent thicker than molasses and twice as sweet, who seemed eager to have an interview—the sooner the better. Mom had confessed that they were more than a couple-two young sons came with the package—but had been assured by Mrs. Jones that the “quarters” were adequate for a family.
“North Twelfth street is fancy,” Aunt Dell had pointed out. “That’s on the other side of Van Buren, the right side of the tracks. Now way up there—what did you say the number was? 1548? Oh me, that’s waaaay up there. By the new High School. Lincoln High. Couldn’t be better. New grade school too. Best schools for the boys.”
I was ordered into the bath with Dad’s left-over water—there was always a water shortage in Phoenix—and told to make myself “shine”. Mom and Dad kept moving back and forth into the bathroom, Dad turning purple in the face buttoning his shirt collar and sliding a pre-knotted tie under his chin. Mom fussed with her hair with a worried look.
“But what if they are, Woody?” Mom said, pushing him away from the mirror.
“Milly, a job’s a job.”
“I know, but would you work for …”
“People are people, Milly.” Dad had the tie crookedly in place. “That’s what you’re always sayin’.”
“Yes, well, I don’t know.” She grabbed at Dad’s tie. “Hold still.” She made a slight adjustment that didn’t change a thing. “There.” She patted his chest absent-mindedly, noticing me in the bathtub as though for the first time. “Oh. Where’s Junior?”
“In the garage.”
“What in the world is he … Oh, dear. Is he still sulking?”
“Sweltering is more like it. He’s in a heavy wool cap and he won’t take it off until his hair grows back.”
“Well. He’ll just have to stay here then. You hurry up.” She stared wide-eyed at herself in the mirror, rolling her lips together to spread the lipstick. She shook her head at her reflection and bustled out of the room.
We drove past the swimming pool, up to Van Buren, then down it to the “old” high school, Phoenix Union—soon learning to refer to it as old P.U. pronounced Pee-Yew, with a suggestion of clamping out smells with thumb and forefinger—where we turned left on Twelfth Street and went up and up and up. The numbers getting bigger as we went along past neat low houses set in ever-increasingly elaborate gardens. The houses got more and more substantial, some even two-storied, squelching the idea that I was beginning to get fixed about Phoenix that everything was built low and squashed out because the sun melted everything and prevented it from growing tall, rather like the crabgrass that covered everything by hugging the ground.
We almost missed 1548 North Twelfth Street because all we could see was a high beige-colored wall that extended for more than a city block to an arterial stop at what we saw was Missouri Avenue. “By God,” Dad said, “we’re back home.”
“It’s back there, Dad,” I called. “I saw some big gates painted that same color as the walls. You could hardly see the numbers. Brass ones set into the wall. Small. Back up.”
Dad had to wait for several cars to go past before he could reverse, then he expertly backed into a gravelled drive in front of the big gates. We all just sat for a moment. I twisted around in my seat and looked out the back window. “There’s a bell right there beside the number.”
Mom and Dad just sat looking straight ahead. Then they turned and looked at each other and suddenly burst out laughing. “Ready?” Dad asked.
“Ready,” Mom answered and they opened the car doors at the exact same moment.
I clambered out on Mom’s side and closed the door and adjusted the crease in my pants—an old pair of Junior’s—and clasped my hands behind my back to hide a none too discreet patch before joining them. I saw Dad pushing the bell and looking up at the top of the huge gate. It was still daylight, but not bright enough for us to have noticed a small door so neatly cut into the big one that we all jumped back when it was opened by a young man.
Mom started to say something but the young man said unceremoniously, “Come in,” and stepped aside to let Mom step over the high board at the bottom. I saw her catch her breath once she was on the other side. Dad stepped in briskly and I followed and caught my breath too.
We were in an exotic tropical garden shaded by a huge tree on the left that I learned later was a magnolia. Creepers with flowers that looked like orchids climbed up and across a long lattice trellis that covered the gravel drive. The tropical effect was made complete by a hair-raising squawk that made us all jump in surprise. It came from a huge parrot on a stand with a chain connected to one of its legs. It looked as ferocious as it sounded and I also learned later, was. The young man had disappeared after motioning us to a stone bench in a paved area off the drive surrounded by rose bushes all in full bloom of blazing colors. We none of us could speak. I watched the young man disappear up a slight ramp and through two dark swinging doors into what must be the house but it was so buried in vines and flowering bushes it was hard to tell. If it was the house, it was made from the same material as the exterior walls and painted the same pinkish beige.
A door next to the swinging doors onto the ramp opened silently revealing a tiny elegant woman whose hair really was Little Orphan Annie’s—so blond it was almost white. She took a step toward us and stopped with a slight frown. “Mrs. Woods? We were expectin’ a couple by the name of Woods.” The voice was as
Mom had described it but was now sounding sweetly confused.
“That’s right, we’re the Woods.” Mom took a tentative step forward. “Mrs. Jones?”
“Yea-us, ah’m Mizzus Jones … but you see … Well, excuse me, but ah’m just a bit taken aback … ah had the ah-dea when ah talked on the phone that you must be … Your accent …” I knew our accent was going to be a stumbling block.
Mom glanced over her shoulder at Dad who shrugged slightly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones, if there’s been some mistake …” She took a deep breath and started talking rather fast. Fast for Mom. “I must confess that I’m a bit confused, too. You … on the phone …” Mom laughed a bit nervously, “your accent, well I though that you might be …”
A great booming laugh startled us and directed our eyes to the ramp. Poised on the top of it was a low flat bed with small wheels on which a man was stretched out who continued to laugh until he was wracked with a cough that left him breathless. His beautifully trimmed beard was the first one I’d seen outside the movies or on ancient farmers in Galena. His handsome head was propped up somehow and for a moment I thought it was the only part of the thin motionless body that could move but a hand came out from under the impeccable sheet with a huge handkerchief to dab at his mouth as his spasm of coughing died. The young man who’d let us in was at the head of the bed with a slightly glazed expression, paying no attention to what I assumed was his patient.
In Tall Cotton Page 14