“On you?” The boy cocks his head to the side and looks like he’s going to be sick.
“Breathe, I say!” Harold’s nostrils flare and he waits. One thing he knows is the smell of various alcoholic beverages. He knows that cheap wine would stay on a person’s breath even if they had had something else on top of it. Damn, sour vomit and bourbon. He loosens his grip on the boy’s shirt, flexes his fingers, his Mason ring catching Sam Swett’s attention. Sam Swett has to blink several times before he is certain that that is what the man is wearing. He remembers getting to be a Mason; he remembers his Daddy wanting him to become one. “Almost every President of this country has been a Mason and it’s something to be proud of, something that should be passed down from father to son.” Sam Swett thinks it’s a pile of shit; he doesn’t want to belong to any club, doesn’t want to be homogenized. He reaches down and gives this man the secret handshake. At first that man pulls away like he’s crazy, God, if he could remember the password. There are too many words in his head, a dead man, think, think, there; he whispers the word and that man’s eyes get big and he lets go of him.
Harold steps back. How in the hell did somebody like this get to be a Mason? It’s hard as hell to be a Mason, probably wouldn’t have made it himself if his Daddy hadn’t been such a damn good one. “Where are you from?”
“Born in South Cross.”
“Nice area.” Harold shakes his head, glances out the door. Where in the hell are the police? It’s been well over ten minutes since he placed the call. “Mind if I get a drink from you?”
“No.”
“Lemme try that Wild Turkey.” Harold stares at the boy now, that shaved head and filthy shirt. “You don’t look like a Mason. You’re drunk and filthy dirty.”
“You don’t look like a Mason. You’re drunk and your hands are dirty.”
“Give me the shake and word again.” Harold sticks out his hand. “You might’ve just gotten lucky.” Nope, he does it right again, both things, and a Mason sure as hell wouldn’t kill anybody; they don’t allow riffraff in the Masons. They don’t allow riffraff over in South Cross on all them golf courses, either.
“My Dad’s a Shriner.” Sam Swett picks up his underwear, gets the bottle out of his bag, takes a swallow and passes it to the man who takes an even bigger swallow and then half smiles at him. This man is impressed that his Daddy acts like an idiot, riding around on a Moped with that shitty hat on his head, trying to get people to go to a fish fry.
“Good stuff,” the man says and takes another swallow, passes the bottle back. “You know, boy,” he says. “Me and you are here in this store with my friend dead over there behind the counter.
“Dead man.”
“The police may think that’s a little odd.” Harold takes the bottle back. “We got to tell them where we were when it all took place.”
“I was sick, still feel sick.” Sam Swett squats down and puts his head between his knees. He spins when he closes his eyes; he sees that dead man when he closes his eyes, got to stare at the bag, got to go somewhere.
“I was passed out in the back room.” Harold takes another big swallow. “Hey, boy, you got to get up, can’t pass out with the cops coming.” They’ve waited fifteen minutes; Harold hopes that the police will wait just a couple of more. “I got it, now you get up and go along with everything I say, just nod your head with everything.”
“Nod my head with everything you say.” Sam Swett nods, feels the slosh, wants to put his face on the floor but that big man pulls him up, pushes him against a shelf, tells him to stay. There are blue lights flashing around the store, through the glass, doors slam, bells ring. Now there are two cops, agree with everything he says, nod to everything he says, if you want you can spend the night behind bars, hell no, scared of that, never been to jail, nod to everything he says.
“Harold, should’ve known that was you on the phone at this late hour,” one of the officers says. His name tag says Bobbin; the Mason’s name is Harold; cop looks like a bird with that sharp nose and large Adam’s apple like a turkey, when the red red robin comes bob bob bobbing along.
“Where the hell have you been?” Harold screams. “Look!” He points his hand over the counter without looking. “Charles Husky is dead!” Bobbin walks around and looks while the other cop is talking on his radio.
“Damn,” Bobbin says. “Wish I’d known, could’ve been here sooner, had a domestic over on Injun Street, had to take all the cars over there cause you never know what might happen on Injun Street.”
“My brother-in-law was raised over on Injun Street.” Harold can’t help but throw that in whenever he gets the chance.
“Ernie Stubbs?” Bobbin stands up and shakes his head. “Never’d guess that, him being high society and all.” He nods his head toward Sam Swett. “Who the hell’s that?”
Harold nods his head like he realizes that he’s forgotten to introduce this boy. He doesn’t know his name. “Introduce yourself, son.”
“Sam Swett.”
“He’s from over in South Cross. His old man is a Shriner.”
“Hmmm, he don’t look like his old man would be a Shriner.”
“No, no he doesn’t, let me tell you what I saw.” Harold is talking fast now. “You see this bottle here, Bobbin?” Bobbin nods. “Well, this is evidence. We ain’t touched that bottle cause we knew that it was the evidence.” Harold is pacing again. “Now, I ask you Bobbin, who drinks T. J. Swann Easy Nights wine?”
“Niggers.” Bobbin nods his head. “Never known anybody else to touch it. Tried it myself one time just to see what kind of kick they get from it, you know, so I’d know what to expect when I meet up with one in a alley who’s chocked to the gills.”
“Okay, well, I had just pulled up and was standing out there to smoke a cigarette because Charles Husky hated smoking, hated smoking and drinking, and I saw this nigger man come out of the store and drive off. Bout the time I was coming in, a trucker let this boy out right off the ramp over there and he came strolling up. We came in together and found Charles just like he is now cept he was face down. I knew I shouldn’t have touched him but I was thinking maybe it wasn’t too late, maybe I could give him some artificial breath.”
“What did this nigger look like?” Bobbin whips a pad and pen out of his pocket.
“Now you know they all look alike,” Harold says and thinks a minute. “But I can tell you what he was wearing. He had on one of those big loose bright-colored foreign shirts.”
“Dashiki,” Sam Swett says without thinking. Is Harold telling the truth? He doesn’t remember any of that. He only remembers going around the corner and vomiting. Isn’t right to call black people niggers, not right at all, a violation of civil rights; people are just people. He doesn’t remember any of this, just those M&Ms, how they are homogenized once they escape from their society within the bag.
“What about the car?”
“Big one, an old one, hell, I don’t know what kind it was, didn’t think I’d need to know what kind it was.”
“Hey, call the ambulance, tell ’em it’s gonna be D.O.A.” Bobbin says and gets a very serious look on his face. He always gets a serious look when he uses abbreviations. “Guess you boys can get on,” he says. “You look worn out, Harold, and it looks like you need to take a bath.” He looks at Sam Swett and shakes his head.
“Come on, Sam, I’ll give you a lift,” Harold says and he looks at Charles Husky one last time. It’s a damn shame is what it is, a damn shame. He feels sorry for whoever it is that has to tell Maggie. “Where you want to go?” he asks when they get in his truck which is parked on a side street that runs in back of the store.
“Somewhere,” Sam Swett says and pulls out a bottle. He passes it to Harold, but Harold shakes his head.
“Don’t drink and drive except to come here to the store,” Harold says. “Don’t reckon I’ll be doing that any more, hate that son of a bitch that’s here in the daytime.”
“Hate that son of a bitch.”
“Son, you ain’t sobered yourself at all. You need to sleep it off.”
“Need to sleep it off.”
“How bout going to a motel? I would take you home with me but I ain’t got much room in the trailer.”
“How bout a motel?”
“Now you’re talking. Got any money?”
“Visa, few bills, Exxon card.”
“Here’s Howard Johnson’s right up here.”
“Can’t stay in Ho Jo’s, oh no.”
Damn this boy’s crazy, drunk and crazy as hell. “I’ll take you to the Marshboro Hotel,” Harold says and heads toward Main Street.
“Marshboro Hotel.”
“Ain’t bad, little run down, hell of a lot cheaper than the ones on the highway.” Harold keeps driving while Sam Swett slumps forward a little. Oh no, he shakes his shoulder. “Hey, don’t you puke in my truck, son, just got it vacuumed.”
“Don’t puke, dead man.”
“Just hold on and I’ll have you there soon, right across the street from the bus station, too, in case you’re wanting to catch one in the morning.”
“Catch one in the morning.”
“That’s right, that’s it, hold on, now.” Harold is getting close to his Mama’s house, can spot it from three blocks away with all those damn floodlights, looks like a prison yard. He pulls up in front of the Marshboro Hotel and stops. “You want some help getting in?”
“Nah.” Sam Swett shakes his head and Harold is relieved. He knows several of the people that work in there and he’d hate for them to see him with the likes of this, even if that boy’s Daddy is a Shriner. He waits while the boy gets out of the truck and staggers up to the big glass door. Vacancy, there’s always a vacancy at the Marshboro Hotel. Harold watches until the big door swings shut and then it hits him, Charles Husky is dead, dead, and he saw him, and he lied to Bobbin to protect that odd-looking boy, to protect himself. He waits a minute before pulling away because his hands are shaking again, his head pounding. He sits and stares over at that yellow glow around the corner, the only part of that rundown old boarding house that you can see at this time of the morning.
He’s sober now, completely sober, but it’s a strange feeling, a scary numb feeling, as if his body is doing everything without him having any say-so. A light comes on in an upstairs window of the hotel and he sees the curtains open, then the shaved head pausing there. God, he wants to get away, to forget about everything. Without even thinking, he drives right down Main Street and turns on Maple; he’s just about to pull in the driveway when he realizes that he’s driven home and right there in front of him is his old bedroom window, where right this minute Juanita is probably stretched out with some fool thought running through her head or some damn fool man beside her, and at the moment it doesn’t even make Harold mad. He’s too tired, too fuzzy feeling to get mad, so he just parks across the street where it is dark and watches the house, that house that he built himself. God, why didn’t he just rinse off a little more often?
“Loping through La La Land with Juanita Suggs Weeks,” Juanita whispers to herself and sprawls her leg over on Harold Weeks’ side of the bed. That’s a game that she made up way back when she was still in electrologist school and couldn’t get to sleep for thinking about shocking and tweezing people. Now that Harold has left, it seems like she can’t sleep at all, and even though it was this very game that got her into trouble, she can’t stop playing it. The first time that she ever played this game she was just counting sheep and those sheep were jumping and jumping and pretty soon there was just one sheep going around and around in a circle, and she realized that what she was seeing was that billboard on I-95 that tells you to take a siesta at South of the Border, which reminded her of her very first date with Harold Weeks who she had just met at a little country bar out in the county, when they went to South Carolina to play putt putt in Pedro’s country and drink those sunrise drinks that Juanita is still so fond of, but before she could even think through all of that she was wondering about those worms that Harold Weeks had told her lived down in tequila bottles, and that made her think of that garden snake that she had seen out in her Mama’s yard, which reminded her of those big snakes that’ll choke you to death like one that she had seen on Wild Kingdom when they were over in Africa. So she had to go back to South of the Border, back to those wild colors and bright lights, and that made her think of carnivals and candied apples and don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, Adam’s apple, Harold Weeks’ Adam’s apple, Adam and Eve sitting around in the buff knowing one another just like she and Harold had done in Pedro’s motel, and so on until she was dead asleep, thought out. Through the years she kept playing this game on those nights that Harold was out at the lodge getting soused and those nights that he refused to get up and rinse off. It had gotten to the place where it seemed like she was playing it every night and sometimes even in the daytime, except for on the Sabbath when Harold would stay around home and finally do all kinds of personal things with her.
It had gotten to where all of her days and nights were near about the same—get up and go to Hair Today Gone Tomorrow where she is the owner and fully trained electrologist, perform her time-consuming, tedious professional skill, then come home and wait around for Harold, who very rarely showed up in time for dinner. Then by the time that Harold, Jr. (who looks just like big Harold except for the fact that he’s a little jug-eared) was sound asleep with his little plastic E.T. doll watching over him from the night stand, and Patricia was asleep with her transistor radio blaring away beneath her pillow, she was pooped out, too pooped to sleep actually, and she’d say “loping through la la land with Juanita Suggs Weeks.” Harold always said “Juanita sucks weeds” and it tickled the children to death. Patricia’s name is pronounced Patree-sia because Juanita wanted her to have a Mexican-sounding name like her own, knowing that when they had a Harold, Jr., that they’d call him Harold, Jr., not to mention the fact that Patricia was conceived during a siesta night over at Pedro’s when they didn’t really siesta, and also because all that Juanita wanted the whole time that she was carrying Patricia around were sour cream and bean burritos from Ace Macho’s Nachos, which is a real dive just up from Injun Street but the best burrito-making place in town. Patricia has had a hell of a time in school with that name.
Juanita thinks now that this game is more than a pastime; it is like being born again, a religious experience, being on drugs, a conscience-raising like she has read about in Cosmopolitan. She can drift back and see so many good things that have come out of these thinking times, and just good times in general like in that song that she loves so, “do you remember the times of your life?” Once business got real slow because all the women with moustache shadow that could afford her services were too embarrassed to go to Juanita, and would go out of town instead for fear that someone would recognize them. She’d come home crying, that’s how bad it was, and Harold would lean her back on that crushed velvet spread that’s right now bunched around her feet, get right in her face and say, “Baby, you run into this much shit and there’s bound to be a pony close by,” and then they’d make love right then and there on top of that spread. Then he’d take the kids to McDonald’s so she could get herself feeling better and she’d just lay there and watch the sun set, those pink clouds floating by the window, and pretty soon she’d be in la la land where there was a virus going around that caused women to sprout hair on their chins, knuckles and chests. Those were good times, but there were some bad times as well, and once it all gets started Juanita just can’t get it to stop even if she bunches that pillow all around her head like she’s doing now. It got to where Harold didn’t push her back on that spread any more, even though occasionally she still had a bad day and her thoughts would get to where Harold would fall down and get run over by one of those big tractors, and be laying there between rows of corn with half his head cut off. It seemed that the harder she tried not to think bad things the faster they would come, just li
ke being a child and thinking of a word that you knew was bad and it would just repeat itself in your head, just like a song will do if you especially hate the way that song sounds. As a child she once thought, fuck fuck fuck, knowing that it was bad and it wouldn’t shut off, said it to beat the band. Her mouth would be saying yes or no and her head would say fuck, just like that. The more Harold got to where he didn’t want to make love, the worse those thoughts seemed to get. She even confided once to Judy Carver who was an old high school friend and whose inner thigh hair she was thinning out for free, and she got real shocked-looking and lay there chewing her nail, partly to keep from wincing when the root was shocked, but mostly because she was shocked, clearly she was, and Juanita was shocked because she thought that everybody had had those thoughts from time to time pass through their heads. Finally, when she had finished her work and was dabbing Judy’s stripped follicles with witch hazel, Judy took her nail out of her mouth and said, “Juanita, I think that you need to see somebody about that. You need to see somebody that knows about mental things.” It was bad enough that it was all happening, but to think that her best friend thought that she was mentally out of whack just made it worse. It was like being a child and going somewhere in the car and she’d have to pee so bad she thought she’d bust, and her Mama would say, “Don’t think about it. We’ll stop when we see a clean place.” Every time her Mama said “don’t think about it,” she’d have to think twice as hard and it would sound something like gotta pee, gotta pee, gotta pee. She’d see somebody creep up and push Harold into one of those big pieces of machinery and he’d get all mangled up or else he’d be buried in a grain bin and rattlesnakes would bite the fire out of him. She’d cry and cry while laying there on the bed but it kept right on playing. There was a funeral and she wore tight black jeans and a fringed western shirt and boots and Ace Macho was carrying the casket all by himself. It was just after that episode that she thought that maybe Judy Carver was right, and she started to ride over to South Carolina and find that psychologist who is married to a former client of hers (she had long black hairs sprouting on her toes) but then she changed her mind and went to the preacher instead, thinking that the problem might be deep in her gut instead of her head. He didn’t know Juanita that well because of what she had done for years on the Sabbath Day, even though in recent months Harold had cut her off and spent his Sundays fishing with Charles Husky. The preacher was nice; and said he knew her sister-in-law Kate Stubbs real well and that Kate was such a fine person, and Juanita didn’t even correct him. He said that people can’t control what they dream, that it wasn’t her fault and that God knew it and had already forgiven her. It made her feel somewhat better, even though she didn’t tell him that she wasn’t really asleep when these thoughts came to her but in la la land, which is a lot like that place that Catholics say is between heaven and hell. She was feeling much better, especially when Harold found out that she had had to talk to a preacher and decided that he would take a rinse so they could do it. She was doing fine, almost asleep beside Harold who was already snoring, when suddenly she saw that preacher all dressed up like a rock and roll star, moving his hips all around like Elvis and right in the middle of Jailhouse Rock when he had called her up on the stage to sing harmony, Harold stood up to clap, fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. She tried her best to think pretty words but there came the bad ones, scrotum, scrotum, scrotum, and she couldn’t make them stop, prostrate, prostrate, prostrate, and then gesticulation. Those words always have sounded so nasty to her; make her think of Ralph Waldo Emerson Britt who used to work at the Winn Dixie and would stand up in that little manager’s box with his little red bow tie. She’d think prostrate and then she’d see him nuzzle up to her ear and he’d whisper, “scrotum prostrate.” It just never ends, even now it’s getting away from her and she sees Ralph Britt whispering those words, and she sees what Ralph Britt really did to her and how Harold stormed out of the house and moved to the trailer park without even letting her explain that she thought that she was dreaming it all up when it happened. She tries to think of something a little lighter, like Ernie Stubbs (who is full of shit) saying that he had heard about a man who played the same game and had written seven books about it. She never should have told Ernie about her game, but that was before he got to the big house and wasn’t quite as uppity, aside from the fact that they had all had too much to drink after Granner went to bed. Ernie Stubbs pinched Juanita’s titty one time and said he knew what kind she was, even though he didn’t know what kind she was. She should have told Harold about that but she didn’t. Juanita could write a book. On nights like this when it’s so damn hot and she can’t get to sleep even though she worked out with heavy weights at Nautilus, and even though she’s trying to keep la la on track but can’t, she ought to write a book. She ought to get up and just write down the real story of what happened and why it happened and how she knows that if Harold Weeks was here right now and had rinsed off and said that he’d come back to her for good and had said all that about the shit and the pony, well, then she could sleep. She gets up and untwists that velvet spread where it has slid to the floor, shakes it out and puts it over the chair. She can see those bright green numbers of the digital clock radio that she gave Harold for his birthday, 2:30, and she is wide awake. The clock is set to alarm at 5:30, just like Harold always set it, and she hasn’t changed it so that it will be just right when he comes home. She hears an engine crank and feels her way around the end of the bed over to the window. She pops her head through the curtains in time to see two rear lights getting smaller and smaller on Maple Street. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear that they were the taillights of a Chevrolet truck just like Harold’s.
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