Softspoken

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Softspoken Page 10

by Lucius Shepard


  Jackson allows that it is, in fact, him, and the OF’s smile broadens.

  “Paulus Haynesworth,” he says. “I was a state senator when your daddy was in Colombia. Now I’m not gonna tell you how little you were last time I saw you…” He cocks his head and winks. “But you for sure weren’t big enough to be keeping company with a lovely young lady like this.” He casts Sanie a fond look, then asks Jackson what he’s been up to.

  Jackson introduces Sanie, and the two men spend the next minute or ten trading old fartisms, something at which Jackson has become adept, a conversation that ends with Jackson standing and being introduced to the other three OFs, who’re settling up with Marie. It becomes a fiesta of back-slapping and haw-hawing. Sanie excuses herself to the ladies room and sits in a stall, wishing she had a cigarette, a joint, something to smooth her out. She’s right about Jackson. He’s in trouble and she has to get him back to Chapel Hill. It’s not merely loyalty, it’s in her self-interest, though it’s self-interest in its most responsible form. If she’s to make a clean break, she can’t have it on her conscience that she left him to go mad. She digs in her purse, recalling the phone number Frank Dean wrote down, and extricates her notebook. The woman who worked for Rayfield. There. Janine Morrison. It’s a long shot, but she might provide a piece of information that will help. She digs deeper and strikes gold. At the bottom of the purse, two ten-milligram valium. She usually takes a half, but can’t remember how old they are, so she takes both tablets. Swallows it with tap water. Now she’s ready to face the drive home.

  Jackson, however, doesn’t drive straight home. He’s over being angry, he’s in full-on denial, and he insists upon performing a number of pointless errands in the service of having “fun together.” They stop at the drug store, the bakery, the county building, where Jackson visits the records department and has a copy made, and then to the Piggly Wiggly, where he buys her a bouquet, carrying on a cheerful commentary. Sanie doesn’t have the energy to play his game. The valium has proven to have lost none of its strength, and when he asks her what’s wrong, rather than fabricating a white lie, the manufacture of which has become second nature to her, she’s been living a lie so long, all she can think to say is, “I took a valium,” and rests her head against the passenger side window, the bedraggled flowers in her lap.

  He’s silent a few beats, then says, “I thought you were off them.”

  “I am.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  “I found one in my purse and I took it.”

  “You were looking through your purse, you found a pill, and you said, ‘Oh, boy! I’ll get wasted.’ That’s the sort of thing an addict might do.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Sanie closes her eyes on the brick-and-concrete hallucination of downtown Edenburg. “Spin it however you want. Whatever makes you happy.”

  “I worry about you,” he says. “Anti-depressants, valium. You don’t ever quit, you just have these intervals between drugs.”

  Sanie’s unresponsive and he goes quiet again. He’s so certain nothing’s wrong—with him, anyway—and maybe he’s right. He’s got her half-convinced about half the time that it’s all in her head, that if she’ll just fix herself, make some adjustment, she will wake to find that everything is hunky-dory and get with the program, support him in his quest to accumulate power, money, and, his latest fixation, a dream house (the last thing she wants is a dream house, a more luxurious prison, a place they’ll never have to leave, where they can grow still and old side-by-side, Jackson—in lieu of a pitchfork—holding an immense remote with which he can control everything in their lives, like a hideous yuppie version of American Gothic), recognizing that she’s part of his accumulation, his little treasure, and accepting this state of affairs. Even now she’s tempted toward belief…or not so much belief as surrender. I’ll have the lobotomy, Doctor, she’ll say, if you promise I won’t feel anything afterward. That’s the problem with valium. It doesn’t make you un-depressed; it only makes you not care that you’re depressed.

  “I’ve got one more stop,” he says brightly. “After that we’ll get you home.”

  She nods out for a minute or two, and is roused by Jackson honking the horn. He’s parked in front of the collision shop, a cream-colored concrete block building, and Frank Dean is ambling toward them from the service area, wiping his hands on a rag. Sanie has a flutter of panic, wondering what’s going on, but it passes. She must look like hell, she thinks. Trashed and clutching these ridiculous flowers. Jackson lowers the window as Frank Dean comes up and Sanie manages a two-fingered wave. After a perfunctory greeting, Jackson asks if they can make an appointment to have the SUV checked out. Change the oil, tune up, and so forth.

  “If you want it back same day, better bring it in next week,” says Frank Dean. “How about Wednesday morning? Eight, nine o’clock?”

  “Wednesday it is.” Jackson starts to raise the window, but hesitates and says, “Sanie will probably bring the car in. Could you arrange a ride for her back to the house?”

  Frank Dean peers in at Sanie. “Sure. I can run ’er on out.”

  “Or else…” Jackson looks to her. “You could spend the day in town.”

  Sanie shrugs. “I’ll see how I feel.”

  “Feeling poorly, are ya?” Frank Dean asks, and Jackson says, “She needs to start taking better care of herself.”

  “Couple of my workers been out this week,” says Frank Dean. “All this rain we been having, I’d be surprised if something wasn’t going around.”

  Ever solicitous, Jackson says to Sanie, “We better get you a flu shot.”

  Frank Dean peers in at Sanie again, then checks himself and says, “Well, I gotta get on back to work. See ya Wednesday.”

  Sanie would like to signal him, to let him know this is being done for his benefit as well as hers, an exercise in control; but she can’t think how to do it.

  “You bet,” Jackson says, affecting a thick accent. “Y’all take care now, y’heah.”

  FIFTEEN

  Judging by her husky voice, Janine Morrison is a woman of some maturity, in her forties at least. She asks how Sanie got her number and when Sanie tells her, she says, “Oh, yeah! I think he mentioned you might call. Isn’t he something! I reckon Frank Dean could talk a nun out of being Catholic.” She’s not averse to talking about Rayfield, but says her evenings are booked up through next week, and when Sanie suggests lunch, she says, “I work right through my lunch hour so I can get off early.” She hems and haws, speaks to someone in her office, and says to Sanie, “Me and some friends are going to the game tonight. You could meet us there?”

  “What’s the game?”

  “It’s just high school ball. But Taunton’s our main rival, and everybody gets excited when they come to town.”

  “Will we be able to talk?”

  “Not at the game. It’s going to be crazy. I was thinking afterward we could stop by Frederick’s and talk over a cocktail.”

  Sanie agrees to this, deciding that she won’t try to bargain with Jackson, she’ll just get in the car and drive, and deal with him later, because considering all that happened the day before, chances are he’ll want to go to the game, if only to make her miserable. She asks how she’ll recognize Janine.

  “Oh, I’m easy to spot, hon. Look for a big ol’ girl with red hair, down front in the Edenburg section. I’ll be wearing jeans and a green jersey, and I’ll be shaking it all around!”

  Sanie lays low for much of the day, avoiding contact, and when contact is impossible to avoid, she avoids meaningful conversation. Jackson essays a probing comment or two over morning coffee, attempting to locate a sensitive spot, but she’s shut down emotionally, impervious to his arrows. It’s a condition she’s sought out with increasing frequency over the years, a kind of flotation device that helps her survive the really bad patches. The marriage has become an eddy that threatens to drag her under, and emotional shutdown allows her to
stay afloat temporarily, to bob like a cork and passively resist its pull. She understands that it’s a dangerous habit, that she risks it becoming a permanent part of her, and when she’s in that mode, she’s never at her best, her thoughts churning in sluggish circles. Like today. She knows that Sonny appearing at their door was a sign something is terribly wrong, but as the hours slide past, she loses herself in busy work, sinks deeper into the role of wife, and comes to doubt all of her judgments, no matter how well-founded. They seem flimsy and ridiculous…and then the eddy spins her back around and she bumps into the thought of Sonny and recalls again her reasons for urgency.

  After dinner, as soon as she’s sure that Jackson is deep in his books, she beelines for the SUV, fires up the engine, and drives away without a backward glance, fearful that a backward glance might reveal Jackson on the porch and that would be sufficient to stop her. Once she makes the turn at Snade’s, however, she’s possessed by an extraordinary sense of liberation and, though it’s cold for October, she rolls down the window and lets the wind blow out the stale air. It’s been a while since she felt this easy in her own skin. Her first glimpse of the field, from a distance, framed by darkness, as if a portal has been punched through into a brighter world where the grass is electric green under banked lights, with tiny figures deployed across a grid of white chalk lines, and the dark benches of the bleachers crowded with the rabid children of Edenburg and Taunton…She pulls the SUV over onto the shoulder and drinks the scene in. Everything appears to be connected by invisible strings, event and reaction coming in an unbroken flow. The players scramble across the field, the crowd roars, a whistle blows, the noise dims, the PA intones. And as this sequence repeats over and over, it begins to seem the expression of a long-buried emotion. No, not an emotion, a way of feeling, of being, that used to be hers before the dirt of the world got shoveled into her eyes, before mold set in and beetles gathered to feed on its decay. Life as a current of hot color and noise in which she could immerse herself anytime she wished.

  She arrives at the game early in the second quarter, with Taunton leading 13-7. The Edenburg Pirates, in green unis with white numerals, are playing with energy and skill, but it’s only a matter of time, Sanie thinks, before Taunton, dressed in purple jerseys and black pants, wears them down. Their offensive line is enormous, their fullback is bigger than Edenburg’s biggest player. Sooner or later, in her estimation, their drive blocking will break the Pirates’ will. But in the last seconds prior to halftime, as Taunton’s moving downfield toward another score, their quarterback floats a pass, it’s a balloon, no zip at all, and number 22, the Pirate safety, leaps in front of the receiver and intercepts, races along the sideline uncontested to the end zone, and Edenburg’s up 14-13. The band tootles a discordant version of the fight song; the cheerleaders pogo and hug each other.

  During halftime, with the spirit squad doing Rockette kicks on the sideline, Sanie walks past them, scanning the bleachers, the rows of ecstatic Edenburg supporters, and spies a voluptuous redhead in a Pirate jersey. She’s been operating under the assumption that “big ol’ girl” was South Carolinian for “fat ol’ girl,” but Janine Morrison, though she’s got a few cracks in her veneer, is a good-looking woman with generous features and hair falling to her mid-back, almost six feet tall, sexier and more glamorous (that’s the word for her, glamorous, like a movie star from the ’40s) than you would think to find grazing in a weedy patch like Edenburg. She welcomes Sanie with a hug, introduces her two female friends, both of whom seem dimmed by her light, less friends than accessories, and says, “We’re kicking their ass, huh?”

  A one-point lead isn’t much of an ass-kicking in Sanie’s book, but she keeps her thoughts to herself.

  Janine invites Sanie to squeeze on in beside them and then asks, “So you going with Frank Dean now?”

  “No!” Sanie’s startled by her bluntness. “No, I’m…not. Did he say I was?”

  “He didn’t have to. Whenever he said your name, he got this sorta gone look.” Janine’s impression of Frank Dean is gaping and stuporous. “I could see he was smitten with you.”

  A surge of cheers and band noise attracts Janine’s attention—the teams have come back on the field. She picks up a pair of pom-poms, gives them a shake, and begins yelling, “Here we go Pirates! Here we go!” until it builds into a chant.

  Edenburg scores quickly after the break and leads 21-13, but thereafter Sanie’s analysis proves correct, and Taunton drives for three unanswered touchdowns. The final score, 33-21, does not diminish the crowd’s enthusiasm. They cheer loudly until the end and, when a fight breaks out among the players mingling in the middle of the field, they cheer louder yet. Afterward, driving to Frederick’s in Sanie’s car, Janine tells her this is the closest they have come to beating Taunton in fifteen years.

  “Last year the score was forty-four-zip. And a few years back, they put seventy points on our ass,” she says. “Hon, you mind if I change into my battle gear?” She yanks the jersey over her head, exposing a pair of large and unsupported breasts. “People round here don’t believe much in moral victories.” She struggles with the arms. “But this here’s one moral victory they’ll take.” She frees herself from the jersey, stuffs it into her purse, after first removing a skimpy pink top that, to Sanie’s eye, won’t cover much of Janine’s exuberant flesh. But Janine, with much tugging and adjusting, succeeds in making it work, and Sanie has to admit that, though the top is too young for Janine, the result is pretty spectacular.

  Frederick’s Lounge is upscale for Edenburg, a clean, dimly lit watering hole where black and white families fill the sparkly lime green vinyl booths, eating catfish, pork loin, fried chicken, and hushpuppies. There’s a bandstand at the rear, currently unoccupied, and a long bar with poker machines and high-backed stools, about a third of them filled, and a low-key, fairly sedate atmosphere…until Janine bursts through the door, shaking her pom-poms and everything else, shrieking, “Go Pirates!” and then everyone’s whooping and waving. Sanie follows in Janine’s wake as she stops to hug a half-a-dozen men, feeling like a lady-in-waiting, a little plainer and less vivacious than the queen. They proceed to the rear of the bar, where it’s relatively secluded, and, once they’ve got their drinks (white Russian, Diet Pepsi) and after Janine checks around to ascertain whether or not her entrance created the proper effect, if there is any man left un-hugged, she asks Sanie what she wanted to talk about.

  “Rayfield Bullard,” says Sanie, surprised that Janine has forgotten, but then she’s had so much on her mind: the game, the pink top, men.

  “That’s right. Good ol’ Rayfield! Well, there isn’t that much to tell. I worked for him, and he seduced me.” She gives Sanie a nudge. “You wouldn’t believe the tricks I had to play to get him to make his move. Rayfield may have been a powerbroker in Columbia, but he sure wasn’t any kind of a ladies’ man. You talk about shy! You’d think the man hadn’t never done it before. After the first time, he became more masterful. I must have unlocked his kinky side…and that old devil had some kinks in his tail, let me tell you. But he was so guilty about screwing a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, I had him wrapped around my little finger. He loaned me seed money for my business and cut through the red tape on getting me my realtor’s license.” Janine flips her hair away from her face and grins at the bartender as he passes. “Being with Rayfield taught me all I needed to know about how to handle men.”

  Again, Sanie is taken aback by her forthrightness. “Frank Dean told me you had some curious experiences when you were at the house.”

  “Aside from having sex with Rayfield, you mean?” Janine wrinkles her nose, trying to remember. “You know, I might have been fibbing. I was hoping to get Frank Dean interested, and I’m liable to say anything when I want something.” She says this pridefully, as if it were a virtue.

  Disappointed, because the meeting for which she’s sacrificed marital peace is proving to be a dud, Sanie falls silent, unable to think what more to as
k. A man stops by on his way to the john and hugs Janine, who responds coquettishly, engaging him in a risqué conversation. Once he’s gone she turns to Sanie and, as if she’s misunderstood Sanie’s area of interest, proceeds to lecture her on the psychology of men, a lecture that seems to have been culled from the pages of Cosmo, one to which Sanie partially subscribes, yet which seems increasingly general and misguided the more Janine fleshes it out.

  “As long as you got the candy, men want it,” Janine says. “And that’s all a woman needs to know. A girl like you should be out there partying every night and not worrying about what ol’ Rayfield was up to.”

  “I’m married.” Sanie flashes her ring.

  “You don’t have to spell it out in diamonds, Hon,” says Janine. “You got a little dark cloud over your head that just screams ‘married.’ How long’s it been? Seven years? Eight?”

  Sanie acknowledges that this is in the ball park and is unnerved by the fact that Janine perceives her to be unhappy—Sanie has always thought that she presents an impenetrable smileyface to the world.

  Janine goes on, saying, “You know, so many women believe they have issues with men, when all they really have is issues with a man. You strip away a man’s bullshit, you can have a lot of fun with what’s left.”

  That statement seems to present a contrary to the first portion of the lecture, and Sanie is about to point this out, when yet another member of Janine’s fanclub stops to pay his respects. Hug. Hairflip. This time, the conversation runs long and Sanie fusses with her Diet Pepsi, fiddles with the straw, studies her reflection in the mirror, studies the reflection of the back of the bartender’s head. The place is filling with people who were at the game. Somebody feeds the jukebox; an AC/DC tune comes on loud, but is quickly tuned down to a conversation-friendly level. And then (also in reflection) she notices Frank Dean, dressed in jeans and a navy windbreaker, taking a seat next to Janine, who waves good-bye to the other man, hugs Frank Dean, and gives her most dramatic hairflip yet. Sanie refuses to look directly at him. She’s almost frozen with anger, guessing that, since Janine and Frank Dean are friends, ex-lovers, or whatever, Janine never had anything of substance to tell her and conspired with him to arrange a “chance” meeting. Staring into the mirror begins to feel stupid and she turns to face them.

 

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