Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  And then somebody started singing some kind of German drinking song. I was thinking Patience was going to say something dumb and spoil the moment, but she didn’t. I worried Mr. Bailey would blast past us on his way to the sound box, but he didn’t. I guess he figured he shouldn’t play up the aberrant godlessness on the screen any more than was necessary.

  Maybe, like me, he thought the visuals spoke for themselves.

  * * *

  “What did you think about the end? When she found out he was screwing her and him?” Patience stops mid-whisper, tossing the top of her hamburger bun into the trash can next to our picnic table in front of Gill’s Burger Hut. Sis had dumped us at the fly-infested rattrap so she could walk home with Randall Creighton, a handsome sophomore. Randall’s father ran a funeral home in Sloan County and reeked of formaldehyde and something else no one could put their finger on.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You think they were queer? Like Solomon?” Patience glances toward the open order window where a tall, skinny black man is sweating behind the griddle.

  “Who knows?” I say, picking off the green, diseased tip of a French fry.

  A resident of the Depot, the black community across the railroad tracks, Solomon Davidson was what I would later understand to be transgender, and not a very good one. Solomon always seemed to have thrown himself together at the last minute, with a floral print housedress gathered haphazardly about his neck, a black patent leather purse gaping open, or a scuffed pump missing a heel. No makeup, hat, or belt completed the ensemble, as if he dressed as a woman only as an afterthought.

  It was probably this lack of specificity that saved him a great deal of ridicule. I’m still amazed Fat Gill Loper, a deacon at First Baptist, thought no more about hiring him than the man in the moon. And strangely enough, I can never recall someone lowering their window to yell an epithet in Solomon’s direction. Even Patience, the queen of yelling shit out of car windows, never yelled anything. The worst I’d ever heard about him was a rumor that he smashed out the raw hamburger patties by slipping them under his armpit. I’d always found this hard to believe, as did Patience, since she was now on her second paper-thin burger.

  “Mama says the devil took part of Solomon’s mind, but I don’t know,” Patience says. “Mama thinks the devil took part of everybody’s mind, prob’ly even mine.”

  I took another fry from the mound on the wax paper and wondered what Solomon would think about the horny trio we’d seen today. And I wondered, if he had the means, would he walk the streets of Jackson in the getups the drunken whore wore in the movie, or would he save it for his mirror at home where no one else could see?

  * * *

  The scent of sea water and creosote floods through the open windows of the Buick Electra 225. Six months after we moved, Garrett had traded in the old Buick for an even bigger one. Sis and I are catnapping in the back seat on our return from a Stalworth family reunion in Gulf Shores. The air is cool for late spring. My parents’ soft, sporadic thoughts on the day’s festivities break the monotony of the clunk clunk clunk of the Causeway Bridge below us.

  “Do you think she had any idea?” Tina says to Garrett.

  “Nah.”

  “Do we know how long it was going on before she found out?”

  “Before we found out what?” Sis, usually impossible to wake on a nighttime ride, sits up with a yawn and leans on the back of my father’s seat.

  “Y’all go back to sleep,” Garrett says.

  “What are we talking about?” I say. My mother has never held any family business away from her children. And it doesn’t take much prodding to get her to spill.

  Tina turns her head in our direction. I can see the reflection of her profile in the lights of the Bankhead Tunnel straight ahead. “Amos is leaving Janis for his golf buddy. And, yes, his golf buddy is a man.”

  “Tina…” Garrett acts like he’s going to reprimand her again, but leaves it at that.

  Sis pulls herself closer to Tina. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I’m not kidding you. And if there’s one thing you need to understand, it’s that the Stalworths don’t love like other people.”

  “Honey…” Garrett draws it out, his last protest on the subject.

  Inside the well-lit tunnel, it may as well be daylight. A Mack truck gets too close for Garrett’s comfort.

  “Bastard,” Garrett says, blowing the horn.

  “The men don’t just love men and the women don’t just love women.” Tina puts up the electric windows, an act that makes everything that follows seem even more earth-shattering. “Not your father, of course. But your great-aunt Frieda? Remember her?”

  “Uh-huh,” Sis says, transfixed.

  I still haven’t moved. I’m not sure I can.

  “Caught with a minister’s wife at a women’s retreat.”

  Sis looks at me and makes an “O” with her mouth.

  “Your great-grandfather Stalworth?”

  I’m not sure I can stand it.

  “Hoooney…”

  “Took up with a piano tuner named Eddie from Pike County after Flora passed. Aaand,” Tina says, raising a finger for effect, “he looked just like Clark Gable.”

  “Okay,” Garrett says. “Story time’s over. You young’uns get some rest. School day’s gonna come mighty early.”

  We all disappear into the pitch black as we leave the tunnel.

  Sis pinches me on the leg. Leaning back in her seat, she faces me, her mouth in the shape of another O.

  I turn myself away from her and look out the window. Underneath the lights of the state docks in the distance, I picture the ancient portrait of my great-grandfather that hangs in the hallway kissing Clark Gable. I am unable to shake the visual for days.

  8

  Our first full summer in Jackson was in full swing. Sis stayed out of my way as she was now fourteen and consumed with boys and music. She would occasionally storm into my bedroom with a new stack of record albums. “This is James Taylor. You’ll love it the first time. Joni Mitchell and David Bowie you’ll hate, but keep listening to them no matter how much you hate it. And stop listening in on my phone conversations. I know it’s you.”

  I struggled with the weekly piano lessons Tina signed me up for. Sis mastered that and everything else: trumpet, mandolin, and fiddle. I checked my ego at the door when she offered to teach me guitar with the other students she taught in the basement. She kicked me out in less than a week. “You’re hopeless,” she said. “In so many ways I can’t even tell you.”

  * * *

  My mandatory time served at the Locke kick-started my lifelong fascination with the world of movies. I tried desperately to get Garrett to accompany me on my matinee outings, something both of us would enjoy. Much to my chagrin, he always countered with an offer to join him in some activity that would eventually lead to an animal’s untimely death.

  In what I considered the most egregious slap in the face of my love for cinema, Garrett would bail during the last five minutes of any movie he was forced to watch. Like clockwork, Tina, Sis, and I would strain to hear the crucial last words of a film over the pop of the lever on his recliner. As the plane’s propeller sputtered to life on the runway behind Ilsa and Rick in Casablanca, Garrett stood, stretching and yawning like a bear. “I’ve had enough,” he’d say, disappearing into the kitchen for a piece of cake.

  “You can’t tell me you don’t give one whit as to what happens to these poor people!” Tina hollered.

  “Y’all can tell me how it ends,” he’d always say. But he never asked.

  * * *

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” Patience says. She climbs the ladder to the roof of the tree house and sits next to me. From my perch, I can easily command the battalion of boy and girl soldiers on the ground below me through the lens of an imaginary camera.

  “Patience, you’re the assistant director. You’re supposed to be on the ground,” I bark half-heartedly.

&
nbsp; Patience undoes the bottom two buttons of her baseball jersey and pulls out the elastic waistband of her shorts. “You better look now, ’cause now’s the only chance you’re gonna get.”

  Taking a moment to gauge whether this is a setup or some unexpected gift from the movie gods, I remember Fanny pointing out a picture of Warren Beatty in one of the Screen Talk! magazines she kept in her big leather purse. “Women throw themselves at this man, huh?” she’d say with a wink. Since Fanny closely followed my obsession with film, I’m sure she thought herself useful in pointing out a future problem.

  Patience puts her other hand on her hip and taps her foot. I peer over the edge of the tree house, checking the activity on the ground below us. Mindy Bradford picks her nose with a grimy thumb, Tommy Grant hawks a loogie at nothing in particular, and Billy Wade casts a knowing glance up the ladder, like he’s waiting for me to invite him to the party.

  “TAKE FIVE, EVERYBODY!” I call with Patience’s cheerleading megaphone, a vital set prop I’d doctored into a more masculine director’s bullhorn with glue and covers from my father’s Field & Stream magazines. “Billy, you’re in charge of the extras!”

  Billy’s shoulders slump in disappointment as he slowly turns around, taking in the motley crew of misfits around him. His radically bowed horse teeth serve as a natural bullhorn of his own. “Okay, nobody move until Bo Skeet says, ‘Action!’”

  Thankful for the respite and anxious to get a peek at what Jimmy Quinn had already confided in me was “no big whoop,” I hear the screen on the back porch door slam.

  “SON, ARE YOU DRESSED WARM ENOUGH?”

  Unwilling to glance in Tina’s direction from this vulnerable position, I call out timidly over my shoulder. “Yes. I am.”

  “ARE YOU PLAYING FAIR?”

  I choose not to answer this one.

  “BO SKEET?”

  Giggles from the troops below.

  “Yes, I’m playing fair!” I say.

  I hear the screen door creak open again, my mother on her way back into the house. “FOR GOD’S SAKE, RUN IN THE HOUSE IF THE SKEETER TRUCK COMES!” This last warning referenced the bug truck that drove through Gulf Coast neighborhoods late summer evenings. The rattletrap vehicle left behind clouds of foul black smoke in an effort to knock out the virulent mosquito population. Not only did it not work, the thought of inhaling the fumes terrified everyone—but none more than Tina. Jeff Jenkins, a junior high math whiz, defied these concerns by riding his bike directly behind the bug killer, inhaling deeply, laughing maniacally as everyone else ran for cover.

  “Hurry,” Patience says, flapping her hands at her sides.

  The shadows of the lush summertime foliage above us makes for sorry sight lines. I can detect nothing but pitch black below me as Patience takes my hand and puts it down her pants. For the briefest of moments my fingers bump clumsily around in sweet, sweaty obscurity, making contact with nothing and everything at the same time.

  “Is that it?”

  “Shut up!” Patience says.

  This time the sensation feels less like hooking a perch and more like pulling myself back from a dangerous point on a high ledge. It’s a feeling I try to prolong while gently continuing my cramped exploration.

  “That’s it,” Patience says, pushing my hand away and closing her shorts with a snap of elastic. “Okay, Scene 36! Let’s go!” she calls over the edge of the tree house, buttoning her shirt with a grin. Patience heads down the ladder, and I’m once again the most powerful figure on the set.

  THE DIXIE

  May 9, 1999

  Letters to the Editor

  It is with no small sense of urgency that I call on my fellow brothers and sisters of Clarke County to vote with their hearts and minds next month regarding the proposed permit to allow the sale of alcohol within the city limits. This fine county of ours, since its inception, has been a beacon to those surrounding us who have chosen to recreate in inebriated revelry. Our children’s future lies in the hands of those who will approach the polls with the welfare of these young, impressionable ones first and foremost on their conscience. Members of the spiritual community who wish to join our door-to-door campaign in making our citizens aware of this potentially catastrophic ordinance should join us in the fellowship hall of Fairweather Baptist Church Saturday morning at 7. Deacons will be equipping all volunteers with pamphlets on alcoholism and divorce.

  Yours in The Word,

  The Reverend C.C. Tompkins

  9

  Six hours and one Xanax-induced catnap later, I’m on my way to baggage claim as a local reporter bemoans the serious lack of rain on the Gulf Coast from a blaring TV in the terminal. A teaser for the afternoon talk shows reminds me to call Frances to inform her that her Oprah dress is ready for pickup.

  “You’re coming back soon, right?” Frances says, talking to at least three other people at the same time.

  “As soon as I possibly can. And I’ll still be handling some of the things we talked about, so don’t freak out.”

  “Thank God. Contrary to what you may believe, I do plan on respecting your time there.”

  “Thanks,” I say without believing a word of it. I retrieve my bags and walk outside, horrified to see Billy Wade jumping out of the cement truck he got after he inherited his daddy’s concrete business. “Listen,” I say to Frances, setting down my bags, shielding my eyes from the Alabama sun. “I gotta go. My ride’s here.”

  “Call me soon. Like yesterday.”

  “Yup,” I say, marveling at how she could make a promise in one breath and take it away in the next.

  Billy Wade spits a brown stream of tobacco juice through a bucktoothed grin. Billy has held me over his head since we were kids. I mean this literally, not figuratively. Although I am of average height and weight, Billy stands well over six feet, with arms like a lumberjack. He has claimed this height since he was fifteen. Billy grabs me around the tops of my legs, hoisting me high in the air above him, running in circles until I threaten to put his eyes out with my thumbs. This warning is meant to conceal the glee in knowing most people never get to know the exhilaration of being tossed high in the air after the age of two and a half.

  “How’s Mr. California?” This being the first thing Billy always asks when he hasn’t seen me in a while.

  “Ha ha.”

  “Hey! I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!” A bleached blonde Patience hangs off the running board of Billy’s ride in blue jean cutoffs and a bikini top, late thirties be damned.

  “Good God,” I say as she jumps off the running board and into my arms like I was a long-lost war vet. “Look at you.”

  Patience laughs, flips her hair and jiggles her bosom. “Yeah, look at me,” she says.

  * * *

  Jackson, Alabama, the place we all wound up, is known as the turkey hunting capital of the universe. The town of four thousand is framed on two sides by cemeteries, the black community on the third, and on the fourth by Plymouth, the paper mill most in the town owed their livelihoods to. A behemoth with two smokestacks standing guard over the muddy Tombigbee River, Plymouth was a Yankee outfit from Idaho that initially had promised wealth and prosperity.

  In the end, it failed to deliver more than a cut-rate shopping center and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. In small-town Alabama, the affluence of any town was always measured by the number of fast food chains the Chamber of Commerce landed, usually springing up on the outskirts of town so as to attract the four-lane traffic. Thomasville, half an hour away, had a Hardee’s, a McDonald’s, and a Sonic Burger, and they didn’t even have a paper mill. It was a sore subject to most in the community, and one of the most consistent bones of contention brought up at town meetings until councilman Tetley Crane forbade anyone to mention it again.

  Presently, the worst drought in almost two hundred years had left the Deep South a shriveled dust bowl of end-of-the-world insanity. Dehydrated dogs died in the streets and nervous housewives shot their philandering husbands in double-wide
trailers. Everywhere I look, the red dirt powder hangs in clumps from oak leaves like fake snow at Christmas.

  I take my place tentatively in the back seat. Billy can’t drive, and he never could. He steers the cement truck like he owns the road. Billy blows his horn at an innocent pedestrian, plowing through a traffic light that turned red five seconds ago.

  “My side of the road!” Billy croaks. Riding shotgun, Patience hollers out the window at an old man shaking his fist as he makes his way safely to the other side of the street. “The light was still green, bonehead!”

  Billy grins at Patience, who plops her bare feet on the dashboard and twists her neck around the headrest. “How’s the schoolmarm?” she asks, always more concerned about the stats of one’s love life than anything else.

  “She’s a professor, and we’re sort of busted up.”

  She winks. “I’m just pullin’ your leg, sugar. And I’m sorry about the bust-up.”

  “How’s Granny?” I ask. Patience had years ago relocated back to Jackson to care for her favorite relative. The matriarch, a lifelong All My Children fan, had absentmindedly begun mingling her own milieu with that of Pine Valley.

  “Granny’s okay, I guess. She’s positively rabid about Erica’s wedding, so I was charged with the task of finding a gift for someone who’s currently doing time in the hoosegow for burying someone alive.”

  “What about you, Billy?” I say. “How’s the better half?”