Big Bad Love (18 page)

He didn't want to get up. Wanted to just stay there on the ground and sleep. Said he could make it if I just moved him into the shade.

I was sitting on the back porch the next evening not doing a damn thing. Drinking a beer. I'd said fuck it for the day. I'd hammered some stuff out, but I didn't know for sure how good it was. It felt good, but I wasn't certain. The world at
large had a pretty narrow-minded conception of everything. Some rootintooter from Chillicothe might get ahold of my stuff, and not have on his favorite pair of crotchless panties that day, and that might cause him to reject my work. I didn't know. I knew editors had to be human, but I also knew that some of them had to be square, uncool, unreceptive to cool new work. I also knew that plenty of them were actively looking for the next new voice. I just didn't know how to find them. They didn't have names that I knew, and the names they had, I didn't know how to find.

It looked like a bat uprising out there. Like all the bats in all the caves of hell had decided to come out and fly around my house. I grew tired of it pretty quickly. I got my shotgun and started shucking and pumping. Pow! Blow your little ass out of the sky. Blam! Leave a hole for the moon to look through.

Well, I harried them away from the dusk, finally. Blew a couple of holes in a few flocks. How could they hang upside down and sleep? I didn't care, because I wasn't with Marilyn any more, and Betti DeLoreo hadn't answered, and I had about four beers in me, which seems to be the break point for me, when I make the decision to fuck up or not. Usually I do, but to my credit, there have been a few times when I have not.

Same evening, a little later, I'd moved the speakers out onto the back porch and I was communing with nature a little. I loved nature and I felt like nature loved me. Why else would
they send those fireflies, and doves, and geese that honked like a pack of wild dogs howling down the sky?

Dark was fine with me. That was when the women moved. They were sort of like snakes, or owls, looking to see what they could latch onto in the night. I loved them for that, thought it was a fine way to be. That was the way I was, and I didn't figure anything was going to change it.

I heard him slowing down on the highway before he got close to the driveway. The distant roaring grew slighter; he was giving himself plenty of room to slow down, taking it easy on his brake shoes. I looked out across the trees and the river and the grass. Catfish were swimming down there in the water. Old turtles that were there when Lee surrendered. I'd seen them, monsters with moss on their heads, pulled up from the depths and clawing against the boat. If you sit down there in a boat still enough, the beavers will come out and sit on the banks and wash their hands and faces.

Yeah, it looked like a night for women. He kept slowing down, coming nearer, and I cranked it up just a little on Thin Lizzy's “Cowboy Song.” I hated it that Philip was dead, and it had only been a couple of weeks since Roy Orbison had died. My heroes had fallen all around me, had been falling for years. Hendrix and Morrison and Joplin and Croce and Chapin and Redding, Elvis and Sam Cooke, he was dead, too, Lennon and Mama Cass, I didn't even want to think about the rest of them.

I heard the gravel crunching under his wheels. Coming to take me away. Lights lanced around the side of the house. I heard his alternator protesting a loose belt, and all fell to
naught. I sipped my beer. I'd been sipping beer for a couple of hours, waiting on him.

The girl looked dead. Damn, she's dead, I thought, looking at her. But then I looked at Monroe and thought, Surely to God he's not dead, too. Finally I could see their chests rising and falling. His pants were halfway on, hers were halfway off. The sun was on us again. We were sort of like superstrong vampires who just got sickened by the sun. It wasn't going to kill us or anything. But it sure didn't make us feel good at certain times.

They were on the back seat. I was on the front. Somebody was plowing a field on a tractor right across the road from us. It was pretty unwonderful there, and to wonder who else might ought to be with us and where we might have left them and what stages of jail/bail we might have left them in, since I vaguely remembered us having some running mates with us at some point the night before.

I woke them up. Monroe seemed to think that a couple of them might be in the Pontotoc County jail and need our renderings, slim as they were.

We booked, naturally, to the Pontotoc County jail. A large man with red cheeks presented himself at the front door.

“Hep y'all?”

“Yessir, we think we got some friends in jail over here maybe.”

“Name?”

“What's their names, Monroe?”

She spoke up. “Jerome and Kerwood White.” She was looking sort of anxious, since they were her little brothers.

“White? White. I don't believe I've got them names on my list. Now I believe we had two Whites killed in a car wreck last night. Here it is. Yeah. That them? Jerome and Kerwood? One subjeck twenty-seven, one twenty-five. Dead on impact. Tractor trailer over here on Highway 6. Cut one of em's head off, I believe. Y'all some kin to the family?”

The funeral of those boys was not a good place to be. It was raining, and muddy, and people were beating each other with fists of grief and screaming and blaming the whole thing on God. It was ironic since they'd all come to Him for comfort on this particular day. I saw some lady bust her ass on the church steps, had black bikini panties on, showed it to the whole world. I had several cuts on my head that nobody could explain.

The place where they buried them was down under a hill with white oak trees. It was very muddy. You could see it sticking to the heels of the ladies' shoes. It was that red clay that lifts out two shoe sizes when you raise your foot. But what made me sadder than anything was all the old wreaths and styrofoam green spray-painted crosses from old monuments and tributes to love piled up against a rusty barbed-wire fence, forlorn and all, wet, funky. Funky funky love. I realized right that moment how different were the different
types of love. Love between man and woman, husband and wife, was much different from, say, between son and father, or father and daughter, or brother and sister, or brother and brother, and father-in-law to second cousin. Love for the right person could make you do anything, give up your own life. I knew there was love that strong. I felt it for my children. I looked next to me and saw Jerome and Kerwood White's mama and daddy holding each other up, staring at those two coffins, and I thought of times in diapers and even before, dates and weddings and visits on the front porch, the first kiss, a little house to start with until some kids came along. What they had on their faces was horror.

I was afraid I knew how it would go. He'd start drinking more, and she'd age quickly. From her loneliness and grief. There'd be a hole in her that nobody'd be able to fill up. Sex at their age was probably not much of a consideration any more. But maybe it was, between them. I hoped it was. I hoped it was an intimate thing between them that would hold them together, his wrinkled old body naked up against her old wrinkled naked body, bodies they remembered from forty years ago. But if it didn't . . . if that couldn't hold them together . . . if there were late nights home from the bars . . . her knitting in the living room, so quiet. . . what purpose to their lives any more. Two of the things they had centered on for so long. From diapers to death. And probably drunk when they died.

I went over to them and held them. I cried with them. They didn't know me. They cried with me anyway.

I saw Raoul's poem. It appeared in the spring issue of
Rabbe Mabbe.
They'd edited it a little, toned it down, taken some or most of the guts out of it, but Raoul didn't want to talk about it. He was writing a novel. I said Go for it, motherfucker.

I got the kids one weekend and she went off to spend it with somebody, I don't know if it was male or female. At that point I wouldn't have put anything past her. I just hoped she wasn't doing anything adverse around the kids.

Alisha shit on me a couple of times. Alan and I built a big fire in the back yard out of wood crates and things and roasted twenty-seven hot dogs and a pack of marshmallows. We pitched our old tent and carried quilts out of the house and pillows and camped out in the back yard the whole weekend except for TV-watching inside in the daytime. Alisha liked it. We didn't know if she was retarded or not. There was a chance, they said, but we didn't know yet. She seemed slow. Slow to focus her eyes, slow to understand words. Slow to learn to use the pot.

At night in the tent I held her to my chest and felt her heart beating under her skin, felt the silk of her hair brushing against my face.
You
deserve better parents than us, kiddo, I thought. She would try to talk but the words would never come. I must have said Daddy to her five hundred times that weekend, just trying to get her to say it. She never would.
But she knew who Daddy was. That was the main thing. She might not have had that word in her head. But she knew who Daddy was.

Alan did, too. He was my cowboy. I wanted him on Thunderbolt with me and I told myself I'd call Uncle Lou about it. We all slept in one sleeping bag because I wanted them close to me, I wanted their little faces and their little hands on me and I wanted to breathe their little sweet untainted exhalations all night long. I did that. And on Sunday evening at five o'clock I gave them back to their mother and tried not to cry when they went down the driveway, waving back to me through the glass and the dust.

Monroe blamed himself for those boys' deaths. That girl was their sister, but I hadn't known that earlier. What they'd done was drive their car at ninety miles an hour under a tractor-trailer that was crossing the highway. One skid mark was ninety feet long. The Highway Patrol said that meant they had one brake shoe working. They went 302 feet out the other side of it before coasting to a rest. The entire top was one small pinched thing like a steel suitcase.

I had to go over to the junkyard with them and look at it. Their sister cried softly on Monroe's shoulder the whole time. I didn't know what had happened, didn't know that we'd met them and gotten in with them briefly and rode around with them for a while, and then gone back to our cars and let them go on to their deaths. She seemed to think somehow that it
was all my fault. I hadn't even been driving.

I told them I'd see them later.

Marilyn called me again. Betti DeLoreo hadn't answered yet. I was getting pretty impatient. I wanted to know the news whether it was good or bad. I didn't mind screwing around with uncertainty, it was dead flat failure I had a problem with.

“Lisha's got ticks all over her.”

“We had her out in the tent. Put some nail polish on em. What are they? Those little bitty ticks?”

“Yeah. Them little tiny ones. You can't hardly see em.”

“They don't carry tick fever. That's the Spotted Brown Dog Tick.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Trying to write. Enjoying knowing you can't even think about trying to wring my balls for thirty-eight more days.”

“Well. I'm getting to be pretty good friends with Judge Johnson. He bought me a milkshake down at Burger King the other day.”

“He sounds like a real groovy guy.”

“Oh, he is, he is. He thinks it's a shame how divorced women get treated in Missippi.”

“What is he, a liberal?”

“I think he's horny.”

“He probably is. I guess you been shaking your ass at him.”

“Nah.”

“Don't tell me. You let him look down your shirt.”

“I think I'm fixing to change jobs.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard about a good job the other day.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is it?”

“Up at a woodworking mill in Memphis. They need somebody to eat sawdust and shit two-by-fours. You interested?”

“I'm gonna have you begging for mercy.”

“Not me, baby.”

“You wait and see. You going out with anybody?”

“I wouldn't tell you if I was.”

“What, she some great old big fat thing with great big titties?”

“Wouldn't you like to know?”

“Well. I been dating a guy that's
real
nice. And for your information, he thought
Blue Velvet
was a sick movie.”

“Shit. What'd you do, rent it just so you could see if he thought it was a sick movie?”

“No.”

“Boy. I bet David Lynch is just losing his lunch right now because you and your boyfriend thought his movie was sick. You dilbert-head.”

“Well, that wasn't the only thing you were crazy over. Anybody who'd buy a red hunting hat and turn it around backwards on his head, and wear it like that, get up in the bathroom and tap dance . . .”

“Look. We've been over this time and time again. He wasn't crazy.”

“Then why'd they put him in that place?”

“Because they
thought
he was crazy.”

“Aha! See there!”

“Look, goddamnit. For the last time. His little brother died. This kid he knew jumped out a window and killed himself. And he was just a kid himself. Now if you don't think that would fuck somebody up . . .”

“But it was just a book!”

I paused.

“Right, right,” I said, and eased the receiver gently onto the cradle.

Some more stories came back in. Some had marvelous rejection slips. Nobody promised their body to me over any of them. I knew that would come later. But I wished they'd hurry up. I still hadn't legged down with anybody and I knew that my sperm was backed up pretty deep. I didn't want the heartbreak of prostate trouble.