Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  “That’s really good news.” I can tell she’s smiling.

  I would later learn both Sis and I would smoke the last cigarettes of our lives today.

  I hang up, wondering how in four hot, fiery hells I can make this happen.

  * * *

  I make my way past the laundry room in the gloomy parking garage of my apartment building and hold my nose against the cloying scent of the Garcias’ grape-flavored detergent. The two-bedroom place I’ve had since I graduated college still falls under the rent control laws of the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. Most days it feels like I may wind up like the other inhabitants of the crumbling abode: seniors whose withered hands will have to be pried from their cheap rental thresholds by the casket makers of the gentrified beachside community.

  But a strange purpose is in my step as I dial Frances’s number, an act that smacks of spontaneity and freedom, two things that never factor into my existence, as I never take vacations and always do as I am told.

  “Piper, hey, it’s Phillip. Didn’t you have some friend who had cancer but ate some sort of Peruvian tree bark and got better?” Mrs. Garcia waves and smiles as she passes with another basket of fruit-flavored laundry. “Well, could you get me any and all phone numbers, websites, and email addresses?” I say, walking straight past the mailboxes since I know Tuesdays are supermarket circular day. “Oh. It’s my mother. Listen. Has Frances had her vodka yet? Great. Could you put her on, please?”

  * * *

  Agnes Roach has been my landlady since I first moved to L.A. Somewhere near eighty, she wears floral house dresses that snap up the front and slip-on house shoes made out of the same brushed corduroy as the slip-on arm protectors she keeps on her aging sofa.

  The culprit, a hot pink Brother sewing machine, is stationed in the hall. Agnes smokes unfiltered Lucky Strikes and drinks Busch beer from a can and cats are everywhere, stalking, hissing, and napping on countertops, windowsills, and china cabinets. She cooks dinner for me every Sunday night: trout, mashed potatoes, green salad with iceberg lettuce and Wishbone dressing. Afterward, we drink ice-cold beer and watch Touched by An Angel on her prehistoric Magnavox.

  As today, Friday, is the day of my departure, Agnes insists I have my last supper with her. Presently, I am finishing off a piece of Marie Callender’s strawberry pie while Agnes pours Diet Squirt from a noisy plastic bottle into my Flintstones jelly glass. Agnes has always liked the fact that I feel comfortable enough to conduct business from her dinner table. Although tonight would be no different than any other at first glance, the alternative medicine book on the empty chair next to me tells a different story.

  “Wait. Piper. So, is it like a spa or what?” My mind momentarily shuts down as I shoo a mewing Siamese kitten from my plate. “No, I’m at my landlady’s. No, it’s just a cat of some sort,” I say, logging more info on my laptop.

  Agnes sits in a chair at the other end of the table and plants her beer on the brushed blue corduroy tablecloth. “If your flight’s at eleven, I need to go fire up the Nova.” Agnes expels a breathy “Who? Me?” at the tinny bing of the doorbell.

  “Want me to get it?” It’s a tad late for visitors.

  “You stay put.” Agnes lumbers over to the door and calls through the peephole like a mob boss. “Who’s there?”

  A familiar female voice comes from the other side. “It’s me, Agnes.”

  Agnes stands firm. “Well, I don’t know who ‘me’ is.”

  “Caroline.”

  “Caroline with a long ‘i’?”

  “Yup.”

  Agnes’s voice softens. “Lord,” she says, opening the door. The yellow porch lightbulb illuminates the girl I’ve been seeing now for six years. “Land sakes,” Agnes says, embracing Caroline, “come on in here.” Caroline follows Agnes into the living room and pushes a thick strand of her long, stunning mane over one ear. Agnes grabs Caroline by the forearm and turns her to me like she’s the next item up for auction. “I thought y’all was busted up.”

  Truth was, we were. “Well…”

  Caroline smiles at Agnes, then at me. “I thought if you still needed a ride to the airport…”

  “Oh, goodness,” Agnes barks, “you know I am loath to drive after dark. Specially since those fuckers who did my laser surgery murdered my night vision.”

  I nod thankfully at the only girl I’d ever dated who insisted on keeping the lights on the first time we made love. I was afraid she’d ditch me as soon as she saw the love handles I had no trouble hiding when the guys started wearing their shirttails out. I close the medicine book in front of me, recalling how I pulled away when she orgasmed so I could see the look on her face.

  I collect the rest of my things from the table and shove them in my carry-on, moved by the fact that a rumor of death could temporarily rejoin those whom life had torn asunder. Hoisting the bag over my shoulder, I walk across the room and kiss Caroline lightly on the cheek.

  Fighting back tears, Agnes cuts her eyes at the white Persian eating a lime-crusted turd from the nearby cat box. She slaps a rolled-up newspaper against the palm of her hand. “Shoo, you.”

  * * *

  Taking another sip of my fifteen-dollar chardonnay in the tiki bar near Gate 57, I leave my nose in the glass two seconds longer to avoid the ammonia scent coming from the men’s room. “Crap. I forgot my toothbrush.”

  “I’m sure your mother will have an extra. I mean, don’t all Southern mothers have an extra everything?”

  I nod, certain Caroline’s right. She’s never met my mother, nor anyone else in my family. Probably because that would make it too official. “So. Gary dropped me from his roster. I’m no longer a Forefront client.”

  “Oh God, Phillip, no.”

  It took me ages to figure out the reason for my breakup with Caroline was I stayed too angry and depressed from enduring one career setback after another. I’m sure I dropped this Gary bomb as a reminder, in case she’d forgotten the ceaseless keg of nails I’d already pounded into the lid of our relationship coffin.

  “This will be the final boarding call for Flight 193 to Atlanta.”

  “Final? I never heard the first one,” I say, standing and taking one last swig from the plastic glass, cringing as I remember there are no such things as nonstops to Mobile. The joke back home is that even when you go to heaven, you still have to change planes in Atlanta. I absentmindedly attempt to figure out how to pull up the handle on the carry-on I’ve had for eons.

  “Here, let me.” Caroline kneels next to me and studies the bag, another selfless gesture from someone trying their best to say and do all the right things at a time when everything in my universe, once again, feels as if it’s teetering on calamity.

  “I’ll carry it,” I say with a grunt, balancing it in front of me like I’m moving furniture. “I mean, it’s a carry-on, right?”

  Caroline looks at me for a moment and kisses me on the cheek. “You be careful back there. It’s all gonna—” She stops for a second. “You know, I thought about stowing away in your knapsack on your flight to Tennessee Williams–land.”

  “That’s sweet,” I say. “You’re sweet.” I put the suitcase down and bury my head in her bosom like a youngster panicked on the first day of school. Caroline-with-the-long-“i” pats my back like she’s soothing a colicky baby. “I remember the time when I wanted to live right here,” I moan. She lets me be for a few seconds before she pulls away and points me toward the gate.

  I step out of the tiki bar and merge onto the busy concourse below. Looking over my shoulder, I see her wiping away a tear with the sleeve of her UCLA sweatshirt. I pretend I don’t see it. Instead, I try to lighten the mood by fastening an imaginary noose above my head, my face bulging in comic desperation as I make my way backward to my tenuous future.

  Briefly colliding with a bustling flight attendant, I straighten up, looking for one last reassuring glimpse from Caroline, but she’s already gone.

  The speaker above my head crackles to life.
“This is the final call.”

  2

  I come from a county on the Gulf Coast of Alabama bordering the Florida panhandle. Winston Gant, the pugnacious attorney who sold my father the lot on which he built our first house, claimed to sleep with his head in the Heart of Dixie and his butt in the Sunshine State, a report no one felt compelled to disprove.

  Brewton was a colony of middle- to upper-middle-class homes built on Murder Creek, a tributary of the Conecuh River. The place got its name from a tale about a party of Royalists traveling in the 1700s from South Carolina to Pensacola who were savagely slaughtered by a roaming band of traders. Centuries later, the football teams of Brewton’s T.R. Miller High School and East Brewton’s W.S. Neal face off each October in a bloody combat that makes that fracas pale in comparison.

  In the 1960s and 70s, the town claimed to have more millionaires than any other Southern town of its size, a fact proven by the still-standing mansions built by the early lumber barons, many of them occupied by their descendants. That tidbit, combined with the cold hard-ish fact that the area, known as the blueberry capital of the south, had also been declared one of the one hundred best small towns in America by some Yankee journalist, lent its citizens the impression they weren’t adrift in a sea of paucity and ignorance.

  In any case, we had all been informed at a very early age we should be damned grateful we lived in Alabama. After all, it could be much worse. We could live in Mississippi, a place I passed through twice growing up without ever finding out what made it worse than the state we already lived in.

  Some idiot once said God never gives you any more than you can handle, but the way I always saw it, all you have to do is glance in any graveyard, back alley bar, or skid row refrigerator box to find those who got just that.

  Tina Kimbrough, a Baptist preacher’s daughter, was a product of the fifties. Homecoming queen two years in a row, she married my father, Garrett Stalworth, her high school sweetheart. Abandoning her dreams of becoming an art teacher so she could raise a family, Tina suffered three nervous breakdowns because she couldn’t speak up for herself.

  My father, on the other hand, chose pharmaceuticals as his profession, adjusted his blinders, and took off running. Tina developed a lifelong tell—a shallow clearing of her throat every time one of her requests to my father to take the garbage out, let the dog in, or lower the volume on the TV was ignored. “Aheeem,” she’d say, completing the task herself without another word.

  “Did you want something, baby?” Garrett would yell from another part of the house five minutes later.

  “No,” my mother would whisper, slamming the screen door, shoving a chair roughly under the table, or clanging a glass noisily in the dish drain.

  When Tina was in labor with my sister, both of them almost died. The doctors forbade her to have another, instructions my mother thankfully took to heart for only a short time. According to most accounts, Sis came out of the womb bawling like a burn victim and offered those around her no relief in sight for years.

  My great-aunt Violet told my mother to let her cry, advice she had gleaned from an article in Ladies Home Journal. But day after day, a naïvely hopeful Tina would dress Sis up in her frilly pink finest, pretending this time would be different. And day after day, the ladies of the town would nod nervously as mother and child approached, Tina offering them another opportunity to peep into the inviting confines of the carriage before they were forced to excuse themselves over another one of Sis’s bloodcurdling bawls.

  Aunt Violet used to tell Tina there was only so much shit a person could take before they took the reins of their life into their own hands. And although Violet drank herself to an early death because God had given her more than she could handle, I probably owe my life to that gin-soaked observation.

  “You’ve got another one yet,” she told my mother as they sat on opposite ends of the Formica table in our little white house on Dawson Street.

  “But the doctors—”

  Violet patted Tina’s hand. “You’ve got a boy. Worth the trouble. Not like this first one. Easy labor. A happy, grateful child.”

  Aunt Violet was gifted with two uncanny abilities: telling the future and removing a person’s wart by rubbing it with her thumbs, an art that had its roots in our ancestors’ native Germany and perfected in backwoods Appalachia. Sometimes she even read the subject’s fortune through the designs on the wart. On this particular day, she was removing a callus from the bottom of one of Tina’s aching feet.

  While Tina sipped her tea, she calmly took in her aunt’s old world divination, ignoring Sis’s fiery screams from the nursery upstairs.

  “You should get someone to help with the other,” Aunt Violet said, tilting her head in the direction of Sis’s cries. She stepped on the lid release of the trash can before dropping the remains of the callus on an empty bag of English peas.

  * * *

  When my sister was three and a half, Tina had reached the end of her rope. Returning to the car in tears from yet another humiliating scene in the A&P, when she had actually been asked to remove Sis from the premises, Tina saw an ad for Dewey’s Sweet & Soft Laundry Detergent playing on ten identical televisions in the storefront window of Horton’s TV & Hi-Fi. In the ad, the stunning, happy mother held her giddy, handsome baby boy playfully above her head in soft, loving focus. Stuffing a still-sobbing Sis into the back seat of the Falcon, Tina’s focus drifted back to the carefree scene of mother and son before her.

  I swam out—like a fish—nine months later, arriving on the heels of a storm that stole springtime blooms from gardens as far north as Birmingham. For the first time in history, the Azalea Trail, a pageant where debutants paraded in hoop skirt regalia by antebellum homes like the Civil War had only been a tale told to bad children, had to be called off.

  The delivery nurse said it was the easiest birth she’d ever attended.

  3

  My father’s father, Harold Stalworth, was a hard, quiet man who withheld his affections from a needy brood starving for it. The son of a blind tombstone salesman and a homemaker from the tiny town of Whatley, Alabama, he was a self-made success by age thirty with his own general store and taxi service. On Sunday afternoons, Poppy, as we called him, would greet me with a firm handshake, never a hug, even when I was small.

  I could never reconcile the old silent figure dressed in a suit and tie in August heat with the man some said had run liquor during Prohibition just for the fun of it. The authorities could never catch him, as he tied pine limbs to the bumper of his Hudson to cover his tracks on the dirt roads of Clarke County.

  Mama Louella had no nurturing traits either, having considered jumping out of a crabapple tree in order to terminate another unwanted pregnancy. The child of poor dirt farmers in northwest Florida, she wanted nothing more than to spend her days gallivanting with her younger siblings, especially since she now had a household staff to take care of the cooking and cleaning.

  Decades later, Mama Louella would be watching the Pride parade coverage on the news at my Aunt Sarah’s in Atlanta. “I think I could have been one o’ them in a different time,” she said, pointing to a militant lesbian leading the brigade.

  My father’s saving grace came in the form of Poppy’s mother, Pauline, who practically adopted him. Realizing the existence Garrett had narrowly escaped, Pauline spent every spare second with her grandson, showering him with love and attention. An avid nature lover, she taught him everything he needed to know about the world in the piney woods around Whatley. It’s because of her, and my father, that I can identify a particular species of bird, tree, or fish and tell you when it roosts, seeds, or spawns. It’s a gift I wouldn’t appreciate for years to come.

  My aunt Sarah came across an old photo of Garrett and my uncle Thomas when they were boys, standing outside Poppy’s store. Covered in dirt and meanness, they look like they’d just beaten the life out of each other. Pauline couldn’t have entered at a better time.

  Maybe because she made
Garrett the star of the show, he was already in the habit of putting himself first by the time he came to us. Of course, it could have also just been a sign of the times. Did other men put their wives first in the fifties, sixties and seventies? I think not. I just imagine some wives handled it better than others.

  Garrett was never mean, nor was he violent. In fact, he was the direct opposite. He cried every time Judy sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” during the annual showings of The Wizard of Oz. He’d tell you he loved you several times a day. Every time he walked past Sis, he’d wink and say, “Daddy’s baby girl.” He’d come into my dark bedroom each night to tousle my hair. If I was still awake, I’d hear him make a tiny grunt, as if to say to himself, “I made this.” And much to my chagrin, he and Tina were very affectionate with each other. When he walked in after a day’s work, they would share a passionate kiss before he spanked her once hard on the butt. She would giggle, and that would be that.

  The thing was, the man had no interest whatsoever in our interests. We all had our obsessions. Tina had her art, Sis her music, and me movies. Garrett had work, hunting, and fishing. As far as he was concerned, never the twain shall meet. He refused to give up hope, though, that we’d come around to his way of living. He would often bore us with stories of this wife or that who loved to hunt, and kids who lived to rise at dawn to catch a fish.

  I still cannot fathom just how hard I tried to love it.

  One of my earliest memories is of my father and me fishing with a couple of cane poles on Porter’s Lake, which lay below a rusty fence behind the backyards of the Colonial homes on Dawson Street. There wasn’t a whole lot to catch in the tiny tarn except a few perch and some bluegill here and there, but it was one of the few things the two of us did together. One particular day I unexpectedly tied into a bed of shellcracker, and I yanked them in one after another, until I couldn’t yank anymore. My father called me Kingfish around his friends for a year after that, beaming with pride every time he regaled them with the memory of the surprise booty.