Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  A hand was on my head, rubbing it. I tried to look up, couldn’t.

  “Don’t fight it,” the woman said. The voice had been crying. “Don’t fight it. Just let go.”

  I just let go. It all went away.

  * * *

  There was a puppy in the yard with me. I loved to play with that puppy. I was happy. We would run around and around the yard. We would chase the ball and chase the ball and we would yell and laugh and fight and run and yell and fight and play with rags and the woman would laugh and laugh then she would cry and then she would make me and the others sit still and watch close and she would say things and point with the long stick at the big flat thing with the pretty circles and then she would talk and talk and cry then she would laugh again and we would all be happy and after it was day and night and day again and the air was full of different smells some more men came and the woman made us all go to the shed out back and then we came out and she would point with the long stick at the pretty circles on the big flat thing again.

  Then it was day again and me and the puppy played in the yard then there was a man standing outside the yard looking and the woman came out and the man said something and the woman was upset and ran to me but the man got there first and I was watching and I knew I liked the man but just before he reached me my ear started to itch so I scratched it with my right foot and then he picked me up and I knew I liked him so I licked him on the face.

  VIII

  When I woke up my head was a log and the sky was a wedge and the light was a sledgehammer. I was on the front porch of Houlka’s shack. It was afternoon and the sun was out.

  There was a rasping sound nearby. I got my eyes to sort of focus.

  “You better watch drinking that moonshine,” said Houlka. “You never know what that stuff’s got in it.”

  He was sitting out under the tree sharpening his arrows with a bastard file. The sound was worse than the sunlight.

  “Please. Don’t. Mr. Houlka.”

  “Sorry.” He put down the file.

  A bird whistled somewhere. Its song was a fishhook through both my ears. I winced all over.

  “This must be your first big drunk.”

  “Please, Mr. Houlka. Don’t make me talk.”

  “All right,” he said. He came over to me. I was trying to remember all that had happened since we left.

  “What is today?”

  “It’s three days since we left,” he said.

  Some of what happened came back to me.

  He was watching my eyes. For the first time since that day in the courthouse he looked away from me. He slowly put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry about what made you run off. It won’t happen with you again. There are plenty of people who don’t mind at all. But I won’t bother you again. I never should have gotten so close to Mrs. Hippola’s without going in. I have a temper. It gets the best of me sometimes. That was one of those. Did anybody ever tell you what I done time for?”

  “I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. Did it have anything to do with what you tried with me?”

  “No. It was for my temper. I had a fit and killed my wife and kids.”

  I started shaking, from hearing that and from whatever it was I’d drunk. “Shouldn’t they have put you in Starkville?” I asked.

  “The judge didn’t see it that way. But it made a lot of people mad, including some of Boss Eustis’s friends, who don’t think prison was rough enough on me.”

  I tried to sit up.

  “Better not do that. You understand, though, that what happened won’t happen again? Shake on it?”

  I held out my hand, shook his. “I’m shaking enough already,” I said.

  “Houlka, I . . . there was all these animals . . . I . . . think . . .”

  “Don’t try that either. You better try to get some more sleep now. I’m gonna put a bucket of water beside your head, cause next time you wake up that’s all you’re gonna be thinking about. Your glasses and shoes is in your shack. After you feel better, I got a little errand for you.”

  I went back to sleep.

  * * *

  Houlka was right. I woke up, turned over and drank half a bucket of water. Then I had to pee for fifteen minutes. Then I drank the rest of the bucket. Houlka was snoring inside his cabin.

  I went into the kitchen of the big house. Romulus didn’t lecture me. He said God was punishing me enough and to remember the way I felt. I ate some milk and cornbread and tried to remember things but it was no use. Houlka must have told them only that he found me drunk in a ditch somewhere, and that I had been poisoned by bad liquor, which is what I got from the context. Then Miz Luvsey came in and said, “You poor boy,” and, “I suppose you have learned a great lesson,” and so on.

  I left the kitchen. It was just getting dark. Houlka was awake.

  “Feeling any better?”

  “Meep. Nerx. Some,” I finally managed.

  He reached under his cot and brought out a package neatly wrapped with some leftover Christmas stuff from the storage house. He handed it to me and then brought a long-stemmed rose.

  “Don’t worry. I asked Mrs. Eustis for it. First one of the year, it’s been so wet. Take these to Mrs. Hippola’s house. Don’t take any guff off anybody. You’re to give this package and the rose to her personally, and you’re to say ‘The message is thank you for the loan.’ Got that?”

  “Thank you for the loan.”

  “No. ‘The message is thank you for the loan.’”

  “The message is thank you for the loan.”

  * * *

  I was walking into town with the stuff and I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear shooting or fireworks coming from it, and car horns and bicycle bells and Halloween and New Year’s noisemakers. What would people be celebrating in May? Maybe the state of Mississippi was seceding from the Union again.

  I took the back streets. Even they were noisy, people walking back and forth across them, neighbors talking. The main streets sounded like the Barnum and Bailey Circus was out there. None of this was really helping my head.

  I went to the back door of Miz Hippola’s. It sounded like they was throwing a charivari in the parlors and upstairs.

  I knocked. I had to knock about ten times before the door was opened. A man that could have been Uncle Romulus’s twin brother smiled, then turned it into a frown.

  “I’m sorry, young gentleman,” he said. “Mrs. Hippola’s caters only to a white clientele. If you’ll go five blocks back down, and two blocks right, you’ll find Miss Reba’s establishment.”

  “I have a package for Miz Hippola,” I said.

  “I’ll see she gets it,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “I have to deliver it personal.”

  “I’m sure a quarter would obviate that necessity,” he said, reaching in his vest pocket.

  “No, sir.” I said. “I have to deliver it personal.”

  “That will take some doing. As you can see, we’re busy with one thing and another.”

  I held on to the package.

  “Very well. Wait here in the kitchen.” He showed me in then left through the hanging beads.

  There was a Negro woman cooking and washing up dishes. There was a table that seated twenty. The place was smoky. There was yelling and laughter from the parlor, even more from the street outside. I could hear a piano, banjo and kazoo playing some jazz song, but it sounded like it was a million miles away it was so noisy in town.

  Then the beads parted and a white lady in her early forties came in. She had on a blue dress that pushed her titties up so far it looked like they were going to run away. She had black makeup around her eyes, her lipstick was bright green and her hair was coiled up like a big snake on top of her head—it must have been six feet long.


  “What is it? This is the busiest night since election day three years ago.”

  I held out the package. Then I took the rose from behind my back and handed it to her.

  She looked at the flower, like she already knew what was in the wrappings.

  “The message is thank you for the loan.”

  “The answer is once ain’t enough,” she said.

  “Once ain’t enough?”

  “The answer is once ain’t enough,” she said.

  “The answer is once ain’t enough,” I said. She took the things. “Now git. I’m busy.”

  “One thing, ma’am,” I said. “What’s everybody so excited about?”

  The Negro woman dropped her peeling knife. Miz Hippola laughed.

  “They musta kept you way down in the well this week,” said the Negro woman.

  “I been—out of touch, ma’am.”

  “That calls for a drink, Beulah. Get him some needle-beer.”

  “If it’s all the same to you ma’am, that’s what made me miss most of this week.”

  “Well, well. More for the customers then. You really ain’t heard?”

  “No, Ma’am!”

  “Lindy made it!” she said.

  IX

  It’s only after you spend three day trying to drive cattle from one side of a county to the other do you know what tired really is. Overland through muddy fields and around people’s pastures, across what few bridges that ain’t been washed out this spring and across the creeks where they have. Wasn’t no William S. Hart heroics involved. Boss Eustis was supposed to have called around and told everyone we was coming and not to give us no lip, but the Boss probably got to telling stories on the porch one day, and didn’t call Mr. Jerry Younts, so there we was in a yelling match, with fifty head of cattle, and all I wanted to do was go bury my head in the ground like an ostrich while Houlka straightened it out. Mr. Younts sure has some vocabulary.

  We was taking the cattle of course to the land where Mr. Boss Eustis had the undivided half-interest.

  We staggered-ass back home, and I wanted to sleep for a week. But of course that wasn’t to be. It all started, like so many things do in Spunt County, with a casual visitor’s remark.

  * * *

  Miz Eustis had me weeding the walk-border that leads up to the front porch. It was a sunny day and all the Boss’s friends was there, and someone had brought this new guy to meet the Boss while he was doing some business in the (what used to be) sunny Southland.

  He was dressed like a Yankee—dark suit, hat, vest, white tie, pointy little shoes. The guy had introduced him as T. Harris Stottle, who was an adviser to “Big Al Up North.”

  He had a very peculiar way of talking, even for a Yankee. After the usual amenities, and many stories swapped, he was explaining about some exploit that had just happened.

  “So I says, Al, you are being taken for the chump. The guy’s house is all mutted up. His nightclub habitues drip mink and use Jacksons to fire their ropes. Enough ice goes in and out the place as’ll put the Frigidaire people to shame. Then he gives you this balloon juice as how his patrons want more malt and less hootch, and just because you go back together since before they built Syracuse, you buy it. Use your peepers, I says.

  “So Big Al says that sombitch he puts one over on me I feed his dick to his youngest daughter; I trust him that much or I never say such a thing.

  “Well three days later, Big Al’s in his friend’s own club when guys come in and it clouds up with Cicero lightning and Chicago thunder, and they fog the place up pretty bad only Big Al never got his hair mussed. What with a little nudging around, Big Al finds out the man with the rhino for the pop was his good friend, Mr. Poor Mouth.

  “So Big Al says, Stottle, Stottle, you spent time in the knowledge box, what would you do with a friend like that so it hurts for a long time?

  “I said Al, it ain’t so much the hurt as the surprise you want.

  “Al, you got to make with the wide eyes, like you could never in eight hundred and two thousand seven hundred and one years figure out why someone would do such a insane thing as shoot you. Then you invite him and twenty of your best friends to a party, only one person of whom will not be in on the joke. Meanwhile you have rented the vacancy and fixed things up nice, and you go find yourself a powder monkey from a good soup factory and he makes some alterations to the building code. Night of the big senior prom comes; you got lights on and a phonograph in the house making with the party noises, and here comes Mr. Long Face and up he walks and toots the dingdong, and the last thing he is thinking as his beezer goes through his goozle is, I wonder who coulda done this, ’cause Big Al was just absolutely fakelooed by my act!”

  Most of the men on the porch laughed a little nervously.

  “Then I tod him, Al, you’re a great guy, but you gotta start looking around you with your own gleepers. It’s surprising, Al, what you can tell by giving things a glim.”

  “Like what things, Mr. Stottle?” asked JimBob.

  T. Harris Stottle looked out at the road from where the sound of horses’ hooves came. It was Mr. Ness and the others. Some of them nodded toward the Boss.

  “Well, for instance,” said Stottle, watching a minute. “Two of them’s drunk. One has a hangover. One of them just didn’t get any sleep last night; he’s dragging his piles. One has Cupid’s itch and is upholstered, but he ain’t gettin’ any because too many people know. That woman at the back ain’t drunk; she’s either blizzarded out or all gowed up.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Gold dusted? Joy powdered? Happy timed? Mudded? On a sleigh ride? Sucking Bamboo? White crossed? Kicking the gong around? What-ever you people call it down here.”

  “You mean dope?” asked JimBob incredulously.

  “Cocaine or opium, one or the other,” said Stottle.

  “White people? In our town?” asked another.

  “I’m a total stranger here,” said Stottle. “You hand me five hundred dollars and give me thirty minutes in this burg, and I shall come back to this very porch and build you a snowman.”

  “I’ll just be goddamned,” said someone.

  I watched the Horsey Set ride away with some new respect.

  * * *

  Then it began to rain again, and it was the rain that brought on the next thing.

  Houlka and I had been coming back toward town on the old Indian Path from some damnfool errand Miz Eustis sent us on, and a storm caught us, and we crawled under some blowed-over cane in a brake and was fairly dry. It slowed after a while, then stopped. While everything was dripping dry, we heard horses going by on the path, a bunch of them.

  The wind came up and started drying everything off, and we got back on the trail and was heading for the railroad tracks when we saw the horse standing in the middle of the trail and heard the crying.

  It was Miz Rio. She was sitting in a muddy place and was soaked, and she still held the reins of her horse. She was sobbing into the sleeve of her coat.

  “You thrown?” asked Houlka.

  She looked up at us. Her eyes were like skull sockets there were such big black circles under them. She’d lost maybe twenty pounds since the last good look I’d gotten at her.

  “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t go on,” she said.

  “We’ll take you home then,” said Houlka.

  “I . . . don’t have one anymore, except Ness’s place. I don’t want to go back there. I’ll die if I go back there. They’ll find me wherever I am,” she said, crying again. “I want to quit. I can’t go on anymore.”

  Houlka looked at her. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Yes. I’ll die if I go on this way.”

  Houlka turned to me. “I been doing stuff just for the Boss long enough. Time I did s
omething for someone else that don’t make the Boss richer. Take Miss Rio’s horse over to Mr. Ness’s stables. Tell him she told you to. Tell him you met her on the trail, she asked you to take her horse home and tell them she doesn’t want to ride with them any more. Then go home. I’ll be back there before you do.”

  He handed me the horse’s reins and picked up Miz Rio and started for the town.

  I took the horse over to Mr. Ness’s place. The horse wouldn’t let me ride it. I tried to get on it seventy-eleven times. I pulled and pushed it till I got him walking down the road to Mr. Ness’s house.

  The place was already lit up and there was music and racket coming from it by the time I finally got the horse there.

  Mr. Ness, sitting on his horse, was waiting at the gate to the place.

  I walked up to him, held out the reins, wiped sweat off my head. “I met Miz Rio on the old Indian Trail,” I said. “She asked me to bring this here horse back to you and to tell you she don’t want to ride any more, Mr. Ness.”

  He looked at me with them deep green eyes, then looked back past me up the road, searching. then he looked back at me, took the reins, turned and took the horses toward the stables.

  Damned if I wasn’t tired of walking all over Spunt County.

  * * *

  They called me around to the front porch next morning and there wasn’t any laughing going on.

  Mr. Ness and all the others in the Riding Club were sitting on their horses in the yard.

  Boss Eustis started right in on me. “I.O. Lace. They’s a thing that don’t happen nowhere I know of. That’s that a white woman disappears and a nigger boy shows up where she lives and tells somebody that she don’t want to live there any more and gives those people the woman’s horse. You know of anywhere that happens, I.O.?”