Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Now, Mingo Sheffield had just happened upon the key to the door to Victoria Hayes’s heart. She acknowledged his compliment by turning all the way around, and propping an elbow on the seat back, as she continued her interrupted story. “Well, the whole family came out to the airport waving ‘Welcome Home’ signs in my face and yelling like the natives I left behind. Take this first right, Raleigh.”

  “I know.”

  “Bassie slammed his hand on the horn the whole way down this road and the children were screaming, ‘She’s here!’ in case the rest of the county was interested. Reba came out, she was on a cane. That’s the first I knew she’d lost one of her legs. Now it’s two. Those kids threw my bags open on the floor and pawed through them like Arabs in a bazaar.”

  “One time for my window I did pajamas in an Arabian Nights motif. Billy Knox said he loved it.” The lollipop stick and cigarette that hung from Sheffield’s mouth quivered like tusks. “Y’all got a lot of family. I wish I did.”

  “A lot!” Victoria gave her nose a sharp twist. “Mingo, you are all too right.” She had by now entirely thawed toward Sheffield, who, however peculiar, was at least conversational, whereas her nephew was glum as a clam. “Yes, Mingo, there’s probably hundreds of Hayeses wandering the countryside within a fifty-mile radius. There were thirteen of us children. Papa called us his baker’s dozen. If he’d been a baker, he’d have been better off. It’s hard to get ahead as a butcher if you can’t stand killing animals.”

  “Thirteen! That’s sure a lot. But it’s an unlucky number.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Reba’s in the hospital, and Raleigh’s daddy ought to be. A.A. ran off to the North and never bothered to keep in touch. And why it was the two of them that got to go to college and not me is a question for the Women’s Liberation Movement that didn’t bother to get going till it was too late to do me any good. Well, diphtheria took the twins. Poor Whittier was killed in the war.” Victoria ticked off her siblings’ necrology with stern indignation. “It was cancer with Furbus and Serene, then Hackney had his heart attack on the ballfield, the fool, then Big Em succumbed to diabetes.…”

  Mingo leaped in. “My daddy died overnight; he didn’t think there was a thing wrong with him. I’ve got two sisters but they don’t even send me a birthday card from one year to the next.”

  Raleigh Hayes drove through the single sad block of Cowstream, a town of aging storefronts, a movie house with FOR RENT on its marquee, a beauty shop with pictures in the windows of hairstyles nobody had worn since Lyndon Johnson was President, and a thriving McDonald’s on the corner. He pondered extreme alternatives. He could leap from the car and hide out for the rest of his life in the abandoned movie theater, peacefully staring at the empty screen. He could puncture his eardrums and never have to listen to another word anybody said. He could forfeit his inheritance, let Mingo and Victoria jabber their way to New Orleans by themselves, while he sold his house and beach property, and, investing his profits in canned goods, moved to the Knoll Pond cabin to await the approaching nuclear holocaust with Aura and the twins; he’d fish, and Aura would teach the girls to belly dance.

  “Raleigh, right here! Turn! The brick ranch house with all the cars in the driveway. Back up. That’s it.”

  Raleigh had missed the house because his mind was, as usual, elsewhere, and not because he didn’t recognize it. He had spent many weeks of many summers in this house, built in the mid-fifties by his aunt Lovie’s optimistic husband, William “Senior” Clay, as the model for a suburban dream that never woke up. “There’s no city to be a suburb to,” sneered Raleigh, the caustic sixteen-year-old. “You can’t build something called Paradise Homes on a bunch of red dirt outside Cowstream, North Carolina! Your daddy’s nuts,” he’d told the first of Senior’s five sons, Jimmy Clay. “Fung gu!” Jimmy had rebutted, and added, “Wanna see a gorilla, look in the mirror.” “I don’t care,” Raleigh had persisted. “He’s going to lose his shirt.”

  Senior Clay had lost his shirt, and had returned—his pleasant faith in American capitalism inexplicably undiminished—to selling ice cream products for a dairy syndicate. Now, thirty years later, there were only four other ranch houses on Paradise Street, huddled together like covered wagons on the Western plains; their kitchen sliders looked on stubby forests and their picture windows on gullied fields. In the Clay’s side yard was still the fair-sized pond that Senior had always intended to drain and replace with a swimming pool. An oak tree leaned out into the water, but the rope from which the boys had once swung was frayed to a nub of ravel.

  On the long, flat lawn stood the same white plaster birdbath with a midget St. Francis praying beside it, waiting for birds to come dive off his hands into the basin. There was the same flagpole embedded in a concrete slab crusted with flecks of colored glass. In the driveway were four big new cars that announced that they’d been bought at Carolina Cadillacs in Thermopylae. All was the same.

  “Don’t forget, Raleigh,” Mingo whispered. “Okay?” The two men had been left behind by the fast-walking Victoria Anna, who’d already reached the Clays’ front door. It was decorated with a glittered shamrock and cutouts of an Irish girl jigging and an Irish boy swinging a knobby stick. “Even if you do get away from me, Raleigh, and maybe you will—”

  “You’re goddamn right,” Hayes whispered savagely. “I’m not about to spend my life in a toilet with you, the way you eat!”

  Mingo grabbed his arm. “Maybe you will, and then I’ll just blow out my brains and you’ll never forgive yourself.”

  “Don’t count on it. Besides, I don’t believe you could kill yourself if your life depended on it.”

  Mingo started his crazed giggling again, as he snatched the Lucite-cube key chain out of Raleigh’s hand.

  Victoria Anna was opening the door. “They can’t hear us. Probably got three TV sets going, nobody watching any of them.”

  In the empty living room a color television the size of a sideboard was in fact tuned to a game show. From elsewhere came laughter and the tune “Roll Out the Barrel,” being played on a honky-tonk piano. The same inexpensive modern couches and mock Louis XIV armchairs were filled with the same windbreakers, magazines, and overweight cats. Copies of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Reynolds’s Pinkie still stood on opposite walls, staring in sweet private reverie past each other. In the middle of the imitation Chinese rug sat a card table covered with an almost finished jigsaw puzzle of a moose knee-deep in an autumn lake. Under the table the biggest of the cats was eating potato chips.

  Victoria sighed. “I stepped on a plate of deviled eggs the last time I was here.”

  The three intruders followed the laughter; a sign shaped like an arm pointed them down some stairs to “The Wreck Room.” This space, once the basement, ran the whole length of the house, and was still crowded. Against a wall of sports trophies, photographs of dead Hayeses, and a textured print of Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker Hill was a player piano, whose chords were bouncing up and down as if set upon by a saloon ghost. Above the piano, green balloons and green streamers were taped to the cork ceiling. At the far end of the long room, in the light of a lamp made of a drunk clown hanging on to a lamppost, a collection of live Hayeses leaned laughing around a red vinyl bar. The center of the cluster was Raleigh’s aunt Lovie Clay, a tall, big-boned woman who had changed little since he’d seen her last, except that her bouffant hair was now perfectly white. She wore purple toreador pants and a sleeveless blouse and silver sandals. Her arms bent strangely, her face twisted, she was rolling her head and talking gibberish out of the side of her mouth. Then she banged herself sharply on the side of the head. “ ‘Wut dom wod, Llub bey?’ So then he reaches right over and takes Reverend Coldon’s ballpoint, to, you know how he does, draw it, and he says, ‘Mind I steal your dom penis?’! That poor minister turned the color of my pants! Oh Lord!”

  The group around her was laughing so loudly, some kicking at the bar rail, that they hadn’t yet noticed their visitors in the
far doorway. Shaking her head, Victoria Anna whispered to Raleigh, “Lovie always got a lot of attention for being a clown.” She added for Mingo’s benefit, “She tapped, too, and wanted to go into the movies. ’Course, she never got up and did anything about it.”

  Now someone sped toward them in a wheelchair. “VICKY ANNA! Why, and Raleigh! This is a treat!”

  “Reba!” Victoria was surprised to see her sister. “What are you doing here? What in the world are you doing out of the hospital?”

  “Jimmy brought me. I had my last fitting this morning.” Reba patted her new leg. “I’m doing real fine.”

  “You mean you’ve still got your arms?” Victoria muttered darkly.

  “Why you know I wouldn’t miss Lovie’s sixtieth birthday. Your phone didn’t answer. Hattie! Swan! LOVIE! SURPRISE! VICKY ANNA’S HERE! AND GUESS WHO?”

  The crowd swarmed over. Wheat hair and strawberry hair and honey hair and white hair and bald heads. Glasses and hearing aids and molar bridges and neck braces and finger splints and plastic aortas and portable catheters and wooden legs and all. Greetings and hugs rushed around the circle, in the midst of which was hurled Mingo, whom many of them had met, and whose bathing trunks Lovie instantly claimed to have seen fall off thirty years ago when he’d belly-flopped at Forbes Pool. “Don’t mind me, honey, I’m a kidder,” she added, and proved by introducing “the stranger” Raleigh to his own relatives as her young lover from Winston-Salem.

  In fact, Raleigh felt a stranger. He confused a grandson of his dead aunt Serene with one belonging to his dead uncle Hackney. He mistook an ancient palsied creature, who claimed to be his grandfather’s spinster baby sister Hattie, for Little Em, his uncle Furbus’s widow. Raleigh didn’t spend much time with his relatives.

  While Lovie took Mingo over to introduce him to someone wrapped up on the couch, Victoria asked Reba, “What was Lovie doing, banging on her head like that?”

  “Imitating Bassie. She’s so good, she oughta be in the movies. Get her to do Lucille Ball for you tonight, Raleigh.”

  “Tell you the truth, Aunt Reba, I expect I’m going to have to leave before—”

  Victoria pushed in front of him. “Imitating Bassie? What’s the matter with Bascomb?”

  Reba’s hand flew to her mouth. “Didn’t anybody tell you? I thought I told you in the hospital. You were in Texas so long.”

  “Told me what! Nobody tells me a thing.”

  Reba took Raleigh’s hand. “Poor Bassie, bless his heart, had a stroke out on the fairway, on the sixteenth hole. We thought we were going to lose him, but God pulled him on through.”

  The old missionary traveler leaned against the wall and crossed her arms. “Has anything else happened lately, Reba? Y’all are so forgetful, I’d hate to find out a few more of my relations had died and were buried, and y’all neglected to bring it to my attention.”

  Reba took her hand, too. “No, we’re all doing fine.” “Except Bassie had a stroke. Why, he’s only fifty, he’s the baby!”

  “Honey, he woke up a blessed baby, that’s for sure. Couldn’t talk better’n one, had to wear diapers too, just like Papa. Couldn’t read, couldn’t think of the word for something as simple as a chicken leg. Called them um-brellas! But everybody’s been working with him. The kids just had the best time; they taught him to read all over from scratch with Golden Books. And Lovie’s so sweet. She went out and bought him one of those toy pianos to play on with two fingers. You know how Bassie loved the piano.”

  Victoria took off her glasses to scrub at the bridge of her nose. “You think Bassie’d think Lovie was so sweet if he saw her making fun of him like that?”

  Reba spun around, swirling them both with her. “Why, he’s right over there on the couch, see?, having the best time in the world. Come on and give him a big hug.”

  Propped up on the couch, Bascomb Hayes (until recently a golf pro) was now as badly off as Lovie’s imitation had implied. Beside him sat Big Em’s busty daughter Tildy Harmon, a frequent divorcée with platinum hair and skimpy clothes, who had given to her cousin Raleigh, at twelve, what she’d called a “free demonstration” of an open-mouth kiss. She sat on the couch to hold her uncle’s drink so he could slurp it through a straw. It looked like a lime snow-cone, but was actually a frozen daiquiri for St. Patrick’s Day. They were all drinking them.

  “Doesn’t Bassie sound just like Papa?” whispered Reba to her sister Victoria, who snarled, “Exactly.” Bascomb also had the strange sharp laugh that had so frightened Raleigh when it had burst from his grandfather long ago. “Excuse me, need some air,” he said, and hurried to the stairs.

  As he passed the ghostly piano, speeding along through “Swanee,” Hayes suddenly saw his dead uncle Furbus wriggling along its bench, as in the old days, his tobacco-stained fingers feathering higher and higher notes. Beside him leaned Hackney, furiously strumming his little ukulele. These hallucinations from the past were unnerving Raleigh. He had to get outside and breathe. But on the back porch he found himself automatically stopping to look in the old ice cream freezer to see if among the dozens of cartons, there were any Fudgsicles (once his favorite). His head hit the lid when he was crudely goosed from behind.

  “Gotcha molotcha, Ral pal. Hey, hey, stealing Fudgsicles again, hunh? What’d you think of Uncle Earley’s car? I bet you loved it. You just don’t see too many like that anymore. Move over. Any orange in there?”

  Chapter 12

  Raleigh Escapes LOVIE’S SON, JIMMY CLAY of Carolina Cadillacs, reached into the freezer for an orange Popsicle. He wore a pink bow tie and slacks a Doublemint gum-wrapper green. He had the same long, looselimbed look, the same jug ears, the same loafers, and even the same habit of sucking on the stone in his huge class ring that he’d had in high school. The only thing missing was his hair. It was amazing that someone so juvenile could be so bald. Clay’s tongue danced around the orange ice. “ ’Member how I used to get my tongue stuck on these things? The stucky yuckies. ’Member?”

  “No.”

  “Seriously, Ral. I appreciate you coming all the way out to help Mama enjoy her big six-o. Guess what I got her? A poker table, real felt, the workaloopas. What’d you get her?”

  Raleigh, who’d had not the slightest inkling that March 16 was his aunt’s sixtieth birthday, said, “Wait and see,” and walked outdoors, where smoke from two rusty charcoal grills streamed across the lonely fields.

  Clay loped after him. “Whatcho doing in that old Pinto with the KISSY PU plate? Didn’t you drive a Fiesta?”

  “It’s Mingo Sheffield’s.”

  “Oh yeah. I thought I saw old Whaletail downstairs. Nice of him to come.” Clay was now stroking the fender of a new white Cadillac. “A demo,” he explained, licking the sugared ice caught under his ring and dripping down his wrist. “Look in there, Ral. Air, tape, cruise control, message center. Out-Japs the Japs. Stars and Stripes on wheels.” He turned to point at the American flag atop his father’s flagpole in the front yard. “Hey, why, listen, ride with me to pick up some more rum, and check this beautaroot out. I’ll give you a great deal on it if you’re interested.”

  “I’m not.” Hayes opened and savagely shut the door of the gleaming car. “You already gave my daddy one of your family specials. Thanks a lot. He’s taken that convertible to New Orleans when he’s supposed to be under a physician’s care. Now I have to go all the way down there and bring him back.” Hayes walked briskly away to the edge of the pond. Frogs, with a frightful suddenness, kept leaping ahead of him into the rusty water.

  “To New Orleans? Land of dreams do bop de babaroom?” Clay skimmed a popsicle stick into the pond. “Listen, you’ll have a ball. Bourbon Street is hot! Some of those shows, I swear, people are doing it. Food’s great too.” Then the car salesman was solemn. “You know, Ral, Ned Ware’s telling folks Uncle Earley bought that El Dorado for some little black—”

  “Yes!” hissed Hayes. “I know he is, damn him.”

  “Good golly, Miss Molly! It’s not tr
ue, is it? What’s he want with a hooker for at his age? You think he’ll be able to get it up at his age? Seriously?”

  “Jimmy, for God’s sake, would you just go on to the goddamn liquor store.”

  But Clay had started the same nervous cough he had so annoyingly used as a signal decades ago when passing notes to Raleigh during geometry tests, notes scribbled “What’s the ans. to #6?” “Ur ur ur. Something bugging you or something, Ral? Ur ur. I need to ask you some advice. You’ve got a head on your shoulders.” And in demonstration, Clay grabbed it in an affectionate arm lock until Raleigh wrestled free. “Here’s the thing, ur ur. You think I ought to marry Tildy Harmon? Or not?”

  “Not.”

  “Seriously, Raleigh.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m tearing my guts out over this thing. I’m all over the map.” His face swollen with earnestness, Clay pulled his reluctant cousin farther away from the house, to the edge of the weedy orange pond. “Let’s keep this under our hatracks, okay? Here’s the thing.”

  “Yes?…Jimmy?”

  Clay plunged into words. “I’m in touch with my feelings in a much more growing way, now I’m going to group.”

  “Group?”

  Clay crossed his arms one way, then the other, then put his hands in his pockets. “And I’m man enough to lay it out.…I’ve got a problem with a little bit of impotency.”

  “Please don’t lay it out, Jimmy.”

  “But I’m not totally to the stage of self-acceptance where it wouldn’t, ur, bother me if Tildy knew.…”

  “Better her than me,” muttered Hayes and kicked at a wedged rock.

  “About my, well, it’s just when I tense up. But the thing is, I’m always pretty tensed up round Tildy, due to being in love since I was fourteen. You ’member that.”

  “Vaguely.” Hayes pulled out his handkerchief to polish his glasses.

  “Well, come on, what’s the answer? Do you think I should? Or not? I need your help here.”