Sheffield took off his souvenir cap and looked reverently at the Stars and Bars decal. “Gee, no. I never did, I guess. You think some Sheffields were in some of those battles? Really?”
“The name does seem to ring a bell. Yes, yes. Sheffield. Was it Bull Run? Let’s see. Chancellorsville?” Gates shook his head. “Well, never mind. But, really, someday, if I were you, I’d look into it. Absolutely amazing what I’ve been able to find out for people who didn’t have any idea the famous heroes they were directly descended from!”
Mingo leaned over the beer pitcher in big-eyed wonder. “You think you could find out for me?”
“I might.” Gates nodded for about five seconds. “Well, gotta scoot.” He rubbed his mustache and looked again like a pirate. “Grab the check, will yah, my friend? Catch you later. Aces!” He was gone in a flash, as the waitress hurried over and blocked Mingo in the booth. The fat man looked at the bill, which was considerably more than the eleven dollars he had left from his last shoe fifty. “Excuse me, miss, do you take credit cards?”
Sheffield drove straight from the Blockade Runner to Fort Fisher, and although what he saw was mostly just high long mounds of grass called “Confederate Earthworks,” he stood there solemnly for a long while as he dreamed of his ancestor, some Major or Colonel Sheffield, loved by his men and known to his friends as St. Hilary George Stonewall Phillippe, or something like that, who shook his filigreed sword at all the blasting Yankee ships and shouted, “We shall never surrender, sirs, think not that we shall!” Then it started to rain, so Mingo drove back to “Peace and Quiet.”
He found Raleigh on the sink counter, busy glazing the kitchen windowpanes. He was wearing army fatigues, his own old army fatigues, which he’d found in the attic. Mingo sighed. “I wish I could wear something that old. I bet I couldn’t even get my leg in my old clothes. I don’t know how I got so fat.” Hayes turned his head to stare at his friend, who was pawing through his saltwater taffy looking for the strawberry ones. “Gates and I just had lunch at a nice place. He sure is pretty interesting. He’s done just about everything you could think of.”
“I know,” said Hayes.
“He said maybe he’d look up my genealogy for me. Wasn’t that nice? He thinks my family had some heroes in the War between the States, and he’ll research them for me.”
“Forget about that,” Hayes snarled, wheeling around on his knees. “He’ll do no such thing.”
“You mean he doesn’t have time?”
“I mean that’s what he went to prison for!”
“For family trees? Gollee!”
Hayes slapped more putty on the sill. “Where have you been? It’s five twenty.”
“Oh.” Sheffield shyly held out his shopping bags. “I didn’t know you had your uniform. It’s just clothes.” He shook out the socks, shorts, the blue shirt and dotted tie. Then he held up the white suit. “Well, it’s just this. It was the only one Diane had in your size. If you don’t want it, I’ll take it back.”
Raleigh was staring at the fat man, his face bright red. “Diane?”
“At the store. Poor little thing, she’s having a baby and her husband’s gone to Atlanta. I guess you don’t like it, hunh? I kind of didn’t think you would.”
“No, it’s…” Hayes slid down off the counter to take the glossy white wide-lapeled jacket that Sheffield still held up by both shoulders. “Well, Mingo. Well. Gosh. I don’t know what to say. It’s really, it’s really nice of you. But you shouldn’t have. Really.”
Mingo happily bubbled over. “You had to have some clothes, didn’t you? You couldn’t keep wearing mine, could you? Here, try it on. Look at that! Perfect. Cuffs and everything. Gosh, Raleigh, stop saying I shouldn’t have; what are friends for?” He retired to the bathroom, picking up on the way a book called The Optimist’s Daughter. He took it because he considered himself an optimist, and he wanted to see if the one in the book was like him. On the flyleaf was signed in beautiful handwriting, Aura Godwin Hayes.
When he finally came out of the bathroom, he saw Raleigh crawling around the living room floor, squeezing wood putty in the cracks. Back on the kitchen table, he saw a long list of all the tasks the industrious life insurance salesman had or would accomplish. Judging from the bold check marks beside them, he had already taken care of the following: “Kitch. fauc. drips. Tight. pipes. Sh’wr head caulk. Hinge, frnt. dr. Gates, call Rox. Reserve Holiday Inn. Change realtor. Loose porch. Glaze. Cracks.” The only items left undone were “Fert. az. bshes. Deposit Aura, Dan, deed,” and “Bathroom light cord.” As Sheffield had no idea what “Fert. az. bshes” meant (or, for that matter, what Hayes had in mind under “Deposit Aura”), he decided to help out his friend by taking the new brass-beaded pull lying on the table beside a screwdriver, and attaching it to the light fixture on the wall by the bathroom sink, since, as he himself had noticed, someone must have jerked the old one out. Carefully, he removed the bulb, held it up, and looked at it as if it were an idea. Then he took off the porcelain base. Then he studied the socket. He saw the hole into which the little brass beads must go. But how? Maybe he better not touch that socket with his bare hand. Sheffield reached for the washcloth on the sink. Seconds later, Raleigh stood panting in the doorway, shouting, “What? What?” The fat man was lying on the linoleum with his head in the shower stall, still holding in his hand a smoking cloth spotted with little brown scorched smelly nubs. “I’m on fire,” he yelled. “Raleigh, Raleigh! Don’t touch that! It’ll electrocute you!”
“Not anymore.” Hayes held up the burnt black cardboard casing. “You blew all the fuses.”
Fifteen minutes later, as Raleigh was handing Mingo his suitcase, and loading into the backseat his own new clothes and his father’s trumpet, and loading Mingo into the front seat, to send him, hours early, off in the rain to the motel room already reserved in Myrtle Beach, Sheffield kept repeating, “I was just trying to help, that’s all. Why do I have to leave so soon?”
“The best help you can be, honestly, is to go to the Holiday Inn now, and wait, and if I’m not there by the time you wake up in the morning, call the Coast Guard, and tell Aura my last thoughts were my regrets that I never saw her belly dance.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“What do you mean, ‘If I’m not there’? You’re scaring me.”
“I’m only kidding.” Raleigh pushed his gigantic friend into the driver’s seat. “And don’t run out of gas!”
“But, Raleigh, I haven’t got any money!”
“What about your shoe fifties?”
“I spent one on food, and I gave the other one to Diane at the department store so she could take the bus to Atlanta.”
“You what?” Hayes tossed his arms up into the rain as if he were hurling them away. “For God’s sake! Wait here.”
Raleigh ran back, the old Time magazine over his head; he handed Sheffield a hundred-dollar bill. “Don’t spend it all,” he warned. “Good-bye. Thank you for the clothes. Be careful.”
“But, Raleigh, how do I get there?”
“I thought you said you’d been to the beach a million times? Okay, just go back to Seventeen, and stay on it. It’s only about seventy miles.”
“What about if I took the ferry to Southport, wouldn’t that be faster?”
“Fine.”
“But maybe the ferry doesn’t run when it’s raining, because of lightning. I sure wouldn’t want to get caught in another lightning—”
“Mingo, I’m getting soaked! Just get on the damn highway and stay in the damn car! A car’s the safest place you can be. Good-bye!”
But Sheffield did not stay in the car; he made a number of stops. As a result he didn’t arrive at the motel until four hours after he’d left “Peace and Quiet.” The first place he stopped was a massage parlor. At least he thought it was a massage parlor, for although it looked like a large mobile home in a tar pine forest, there were plenty of signs saying it was a professional massage parlor, welcom
ing adults only. Now, Mingo had always wanted to have a professional massage, because he frequently saw people in the movies get them—people like James Bond—and it looked to him as if a professional massage really would make you feel better, especially if you’d been recently mugged by hoods, and been in a bar fight with Marines, and been shot full of electricity. But before tonight, he’d not only been too shy to go into a massage parlor, he’d never actually even seen one. In Life on the Road, however, things seemed to fall right in your lap, the way fighting roosters and chorus girls did for Gates Hayes. If he didn’t go in there, right now, he’d be a chicken for the rest of his life. So, taking a deep breath to fill his Gargantuan lungs, Sheffield knocked, like opportunity, once on the door.
It was quickly opened by a thin woman in a red shortie nightgown; she was wearing, in Mingo’s judgment, an awful lot of makeup. “Hey, you’re big. They call you Paul Bunyan? Step up out of the rain.”
“Mingo Sheffield. Nice to meet you.” Sheffield ducked into the trailer’s living room, where two more women sat at a card table in their nightgowns; a large pretty one was playing solitaire; an angry one was counting cash and credit card slips, which she stacked in a metal box. A very young woman, fairly fat, was stretched out on a couch, watching a rerun of Bewitched on the color television. She was lying there in her underwear, which was shiny purple and too small for her. All these women were wearing an awful lot of makeup. Their furniture was a little on the gaudy side too, especially the tiger face print on the rug, and the big picture on the wall of some naked women holding their breasts. He did like the mobiles made of seashells, but there were an awful lot of them, and he kept banging his head. From behind a closed door, Mingo could hear squeaking noises.
“I’m Delilah,” said the thin woman.
“Really?” asked Mingo. “I never met anybody that actually had that for a name before.” He’d never met anyone who had such greenish-yellow hair before either.
The pretty woman playing solitaire called over, “If we’re talking ‘actually,’ actually her name’s Mary Ella.”
“Shut your f’ing mouth, Jackie, you want to? Okay, Paul Bunyan, what do you have in mind?”
“Is this where you do massages?”
“The very place.” Delilah greasily smiled.
Mingo thought he heard grunts or moans from the closed door. “Excuse me,” he said, ducking as he stepped around the fringed swag light. “Could you tell me how much it costs? I mean just for an ordinary one. That doesn’t take too long. I’m really supposed to be going someplace.”
“Aren’t we all?” the woman called Jackie said.
“Jackie, will you please?” Delilah spoke briskly. “Seventy-five for a straight lay, you on top; hundred if I’m on top. One twenty-five for a head job.”
Mingo looked nervously around. He heard a man’s voice go, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” “You massage heads?”
Jackie laughed. “Why not?”
The girl in her underwear giggled at the television. The heroine of Bewitched, who kept trying to be an ordinary suburban housewife even though she was in fact a powerful witch, had just accidentally turned her husband into a cocker spaniel right in the middle of a big business deal. The dog was frisking all over his client. “Boy, I’ve had a few of those in here,” laughed the girl on the couch.
Mingo was growing suspicious that this was not the sort of professional massage parlor he’d seen in the movies. “Seventy-five dollars?” he asked.
“Are you pulling my leg?” Delilah was no longer smiling. “I saw that Cadillac.”
Mingo ducked around the room. “Gosh, that’s not mine; it’s my friend’s. I don’t really have much money at all, and I lost my job. I got robbed by Hell’s Angels and I gave what I had left in my shoes to a poor little pregnant girl. I just felt like I’d like to have a massage ’cause I never had one, but I thought it’d look more like, well, the Y, but fancier. So, I don’t know, but I’d really be interested to know where y’all get your lingerie. Do you buy it in a store or order from a catalogue or—”
“Call Wylie!” yelled Delilah. “We got another nut!”
Jackie stood up beside Mingo. He could see right through her nightgown. “I like him” she said. “Tell you what. It’s raining, things are slow, I’ll do you for fifty.” And she gave Sheffield’s genitals a soft warm rub, leaving her hand there. “How’s that?”
The closed door opened. A skinny, bald man hurried out through the room, not looking at anyone.
By now Mingo knew that the words “Massage Parlor” were definitely a euphemism. “Well,” he stuttered, “Wu…wu…well. That feels nice.” Then he sighed. “But, well, I guess maybe I don’t think Vera would like it so much. And I feel like it’s half her money. She’s my wife.” He sighed again. “But thanks anyhow.”
“Suit yourself.” Jackie went back to her solitaire.
Mingo couldn’t help but be sorry she’d taken her hand away. Maybe Vera wouldn’t have minded just a few more seconds. “Black ten on the red jack,” he said, trying to stay friendly.
Twenty minutes later, Mingo had won $1.75 from Jackie, playing double solitaire at a quarter a game, and had taught her the onehanded cut.
The fat man’s next stop was in Calabash, where he’d wanted to go because as a child he’d always gotten a lump in his throat whenever Jimmy Durante had walked from one little spotlight to another, tipping his hat and shaking his head and saying, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”
Then Mingo stopped for gas. Then he stopped to use the bathroom. Then he stopped under a highway overpass, because, while it wasn’t raining anymore, he thought he saw lightning ahead. When he began to think the bridge was going to collapse on top of him, and inched the Cadillac back on the road, he was happy to find out that the brightness in the sky was only the lights of Myrtle Beach’s boardwalk amusement park. So he stopped again, for if there was one thing Mingo Sheffield loved, it was amusement parks, except, of course, for the scary rides. It wasn’t as much fun to go by yourself, but still it was better than sitting alone in a motel room waiting to find out if Raleigh had drowned.
The first thing he did was watch a woman make cotton candy; he loved the way she spun it out of nothing into pink clouds. Next, he spent ten quarters trying to get the little robot arm behind the glass case to pick up the ladies’ watch and drop it through the slot to him so he could give it to Vera. But all the arm would pick up was a plastic horseshoe with a penny in it. He didn’t win anything by pitching dimes at colored glass plates either—the dimes just slid right off—or by throwing darts at balloons. But at the shooting gallery, Mingo won, to the disgust of the owner, the biggest stuffed pink bear the man had, and after that he won a fluffy monkey on a stick, and then a white unicorn with a rhinestone collar, and by then a little crowd had started to gather to watch Mingo, his fat face snuggled against the rifle, his round eye squinting down the sights, shoot away one pop-up target after another, shoot them right in the center of the little bull’s-eyes. Down flopped the tin cut-out bears, and Mingo picked a giant can-can doll for a little girl watching him from her father’s shoulders. Down dropped the flying ducks, and Mingo chose a baseball glove for a little boy who’d wriggled to the front row beside him. Finally the man who owned the shooting gallery whispered so nastily, “That’s it, bub, give somebody else a chance,” that Mingo put down his rifle. He gave the unicorn to a teenaged girl who looked as if she might be sad because she was fat, and he gave the monkey to a baby in a stroller. He kept the big pink teddy bear for Vera.
Hugging the bear, Mingo bought a candy apple. He stood in the middle of the midway and watched families and teenagers scream in hysterics at having paid $2.50 to be slammed, tossed, jerked, flung, and otherwise tortured for two minutes by the Blind Bullet, the Hammer, and the Tilt-a-Whirl. Mingo even got halfway through the line to ride the Roller Coaster, but he chickened out, so it was just as well he was by himself and nobody saw. He was a little embarrassed to ride the merry-go-rou
nd without taking a child with him, but it was his favorite ride, because he liked to pretend he was in a cowboy movie; so, studiously choosing a horse that had a nice face and good reins, he heaved himself up, and holding the bear in his lap, rode two times, happily circling the glittery mirrors, and watching, whenever he went past, the cymbals clang together and the old drumstick hit the tattered drum.
Emboldened by his past success at the Thermopylae elementary school, Mingo even climbed up the giant slide, which stretched bouncing down forever and ever. And after politely allowing a dozen small children to go in front of him, he put down his mat, hugged his bear, and asked the two little boys behind him to “Shove”…which they were happy to do. Mingo had never been so frightened. Or so thrilled. He slid twice more, then recklessly bought a ticket for the Ferris wheel. When he felt as if he might scream or vomit after his seat jerked to a swaying stop at the very top, he shut his eyes, clutched the rail and the bear, and told himself that this was Life on the Road and all he had to do was keep his courage up. Slowly, the nausea passed. He blinked open one round eye and looked, not yet down, but straight out, over the rides, over the wooden boardwalk, where lovers strolled blindly, kissing as they walked, until crashed into by a skateboarder or a drunk. The sea was black and swelling and so immense that Mingo couldn’t tell it from the starless sky. He certainly couldn’t see anything on it. Certainly not his friend Raleigh Hayes.
“Poor Raleigh,” whispered Mingo, then, whoosh, down he went, leaving his stomach behind, as the Ferris wheel began turning faster and faster. He liked it! It was even better than the merry-go-round! He liked looking down at the bright moving colors of the other rides. And all the little wandering people looked much tidier from above; they milled about with a kind of overall orderliness, forming pleasant patterns that they couldn’t see, but he could. Maybe, thought Sheffield, that’s the way God feels about the whole world, like Somebody on a universal Ferris wheel.
Handling Sin Page 30