Carolina Moon (22 page)

Ever since they found Jones Jameson’s car a few days ago, Alicia has been as jumpy as a flea. Quee is doing all that she can think of to calm her, to relax her. Quee has even given Alicia a massage in hopes that she would fall asleep and get some rest. But, rest? Lord Jesus, who can rest around here? Old Denny forever spouting some bit of an idea she’s come up with, old Mr. Fatass Radio ringing his bell, Ruthie Crow in front of one of the skinny mirrors reciting, and the orphan child always having to stand out on the back stoop. “Jason, honey, you need to find a girlfriend,” Quee had told him just yesterday, to which Ruthie Crow responded that she did so wish he was a teensy bit older, that she’d wait for his goose-pâté-colored self if he wanted. He turned where Ruthie couldn’t see him and looked like he might upchuck.

Quee has got to speed up the curing process and move these folks on before they make her have a breakdown. What a nuthouse. And Denny. Lord, if Quee had known how really way out there Denny
is
and how the child cannot shut her mouth, Quee might’ve thought long and hard before hiring her. She wishes all of her clients could be as nice and easy as the young woman who just checked in; she
doesn’t even
really
smoke but has come as sort of a little vacation from her husband and young children. She is perfectly content to just sleep, watch a little television, and read. She has told people all over town that she was a closet smoker but finally cracked under Quee’s questioning. “It was cheaper and more convenient than a spa or a breakdown,” the woman said. Now everyone has become kind of interested in the ghost wall, so Quee agreed to give a little tour.

“
THIS IS A
little girl by the name of Sally,” she says and points to a small oval frame. The child in the photograph is dressed in a sailor dress and holding a kitten, squeezing it up to her chest. “She is not an orphan, but she has always felt like one.”

“Why?” Jason, who has to keep moving to get away from Ruthie, asks.

Quee shrugs. “Well, her real father disappeared and then her mother went into a kind of second childhood where she wanted this little Sally to be like her friend or little sister. You know, she’d say things like ‘Sally, come help me braid my hair,’ instead of worrying about whether or not Sally had herself any homework. Of course, Sally
did
her homework, because she knew from even before this picture was taken that she was going to grow up to be
somebody
. That’s what she would say to herself every single morning: ‘I am somebody.’ Then her mama remarried a man who pulled them on into a new life, a very different life, one that this little Sally never felt fully included her.”

“That’s
my
story you’re telling,” Denny says now, because it is impossible for her to go any length of time whatsoever without talking. If Quee ever went to church, Denny is somebody she’d like to see sitting there, because she can’t imagine that Denny could make it through a whole sermon without a question, or comment, or as she always says, a little psychological insight to add.

“That’s a story that belongs to many of us, honey,” Quee says and forces her sweetie smile. “And from that story I could go into a stepfather story, and there are many different varieties there.”

“Yes, mine is a nice one for sure,” Denny says. “I mean, he’s not handsome like my real daddy, or tough like my real daddy, but he is nice.” Quee just nods and moves on down the hall. Denny has tried to wriggle information out of Quee since she landed here: What was my mama like as a girl? What was my daddy like? Did you go to my daddy’s funeral, Quee? Were you there when the military planes flew overhead and dipped their wings and then the whole Fulton High School Band struck up and played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” With every question, Quee has wanted to call Denny’s mama and give her yet another lecture on how to tell a
good
lie, how
not
to go overboard. You don’t just go from having an illegitimate child that probably belonged to somebody else’s too-hot-for-his-britches stepfather, up to having fallen in love with and married a decorated World War II hero. But then again, these are the stories that have probably given Denny the confidence or whatever it is that enables her to talk all the damned time.

“You see—Sally there was somebody who just naturally felt a kind of energy with the world,” Quee continues quietly. “If you look for signs and listen to what is happening all the way around you, then you just automatically know which way to go.”

“Well, I need to have my eyes and ears checked,” Alicia says and walks ahead, stops in front of one of Quee’s favorite photos of all. It’s Baccalaureate Sunday at the Piney Swamp School of Personality in 1902, and there are twenty-one stone-faced young women dressed in white, each holding a daisy. Their teacher is all in black and looks like she might be a hundred and a voodoo queen, when really she was
probably only thirty or so. “What’s your story here?” Alicia asks and lifts little Taylor who has come and grabbed hold of her thigh.

“Well, that one there in the center?” Quee points to the one in black. “The teacher? Well, let’s just say that she has been teaching these young women a lot more than about how to have a good personality.” Quee laughs great big, her eyebrows arching up in an
if you know what I mean
kind of look.

“Tell us, tell us.” The radio guy has stepped into the hall and joined them. He has just come from the sauna and there are little rivers of sweat running down his old hairy chest and plump belly. He’s got one of those big white fluffy towels wrapped around his waist and Quee makes a mental note to go heavy on the Clorox next wash.

“Well, it’s not what you’re thinking,” Quee says. “It’s not S-E-X,” she whispers and rubs Taylor’s head. He looks at her and meows to continue what she calls the pussycat game. She meows back and turns to face Alicia, Denny, and Radio (Jason has wandered back to his room and is playing his music louder than she usually allows).

“These young women,” she points her arm at the long blurry photo. “Are training in medicine. They have learned just enough medical procedures and cures to venture out into the world and do goodness.”

“Goodness!” Radio waves his hand in dismissal and waddles on down the hall to where he has some books waiting. The way he says
books
everybody knows what kind of books. “I don’t want to hear about women and goodness; I want to hear about women and badness.”

“That sounded just like something Jones might say,” Alicia says quietly, and Old Fat Toad stops midroute. At first, there is a satisfied look on his face, mission accomplished, he too can go out into the world and be a disgusting pig shit sort, but then he seems to think
better of it.

“I’m sorry,” he says and rather than be quiet so that everybody is left to watch that fat can rolling down the hall, Quee calls them over to another, a tiny three-by-three black-and-white photo like what might come from an old box camera. Most of the picture is the ocean, a seascape with sea oats lining the dunes of the foreground. A woman sits there, scarf on her head, legs hugged up to her chest.

“I love this one, always have,” Quee says and slips it from its frame, turns it over so they can all see the fine brown lines of writing: “It’s not Heaven but it’s as close as I’ve ever come.”

“We’ve all felt that way from time to time,” Quee says. “Not heaven but as close as you can get.”

“It’s been a long time since I felt that way.” Alicia sidles up closer to Quee, Taylor clutched close; she looks like she might cry, which is precisely what Quee was avoiding when she started this whole gallery tour. I mean it ain’t like she doesn’t have thousands of things to do!

“But you will again, dear heart,” Quee says. “You will.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to . . .” Quee calls Denny closer and whispers. “Hope to spend eternity with Ruthie and Radio without any television or liquor in the world.”

“That’s a promise, all right,” Denny says.

“Yes, that’s a promise.” Alicia wanders back toward the kitchen where Quee is about to start heating up some more oil.

“This is like a school of sorts,” Quee says. “Let’s just say that I’m the teacher. Let’s just say that I am here at the School of Personality to work on you girls. I can teach you some procedures; I can cure your souls.”

Myra is still flat on her back when a neighbor whose name she doesn’t even know walks up in the yard to ask if she can help. Sharpy doesn’t even bark at the woman or her snotty-faced little girl, and Myra makes a mental note to work on that with him; she will teach him aggressiveness and anger direction like she herself never quite mastered.

“Are you okay?” the young woman asks and then her face goes pale and she grimaces, shudders, steps back.

“Stinky dog.” The child reaches her arms for her mother to lift her.

“I must’ve fainted,” Myra says. “I pulled . . .” she pauses, brushing and wiping muddy dirt from leather. “I found this shoe in my topsoil, and then I guess I fainted.”

“What is that?” The child points to where Sharpy is now reluctantly sniffing. It seems Sharpy has done a little digging during Myra’s spell, and now there is what looks like a foot, torn and discolored yes, but a foot nonetheless.

WITHIN MINUTES OF
the 911 call, the police come and uncover the rest of the body that goes with the foot. It is naked and muddy. Myra
tries not to look but can’t help herself; it is just like when Oprah or Geraldo has something on that is sick and not very Christian and she has to watch it anyway. What she sees looks like a sponge—soggy and bloated. The policeman (the same young one who had come around the other day) has gone inside to vomit. He said, right before covering his mouth in as polite a way as possible and running, that it looked like the fish had had a pretty good time with the deceased.

“Do you think?” she asks as soon as he returns, pale and slick-looking. “You know.” She nods her head over toward Jones Jameson’s house.

“Could be,” the man says, and as Myra looks at his sometimes handsome face she is trying to decide if Ruthie would appreciate his needing to wretch from the inside or if it would make her not like him as somebody to go out on a date with. “We got a lot to do.” He holds out his hand to her, and she keeps thinking there’s something she’s supposed to tell him, something about a gremlin. “I will be needing that shoe.”

NOW THAT ALL
the excitement has passed, and Myra has spent the whole afternoon inside with her feet propped up and a cool cloth on her head, she thinks of that naked body with its one shoe. It’s kind of like if Alfred Hitchcock did his own version of Cinderella. Now it all gives her the creeps, and even Sharpy with his warm little wrinkly body isn’t making her feel better. She would call Ruthie, but she’s at the Whorehouse getting cured. Can’t call Howard; he’s dead. So there. The truth is that she has nobody to call. All of her money and refinement and gardening talents, and she has no friends. She almost calls that cop, that Bobbin boy, but then she thinks better of it. What if he was to start thinking she was somehow involved? She
did
after all tell him all about arsenic the other day.
I am the doctor’s wife
, she thinks now.
Of course I know all about anything like that!

She is nervous all over, twitching nervous. She goes and gets herself a little cooking sherry with some vanilla extract on the side, which tastes awful but nonetheless soothes her, and then she sits with her robe pulled tight around her and stares at the telephone. Does she dare to do it? She dials and then sits there twisting to the point that Sharpy moves over to another chair. “Hello, Connie?” She makes her voice real slow and sweet; it’s what Howard always called her Sunday school voice. “Connie, the Lord has really tried me today. Uh-huh, yes. The Lord caused a dead man to wash right up into my yard.”

“Oh, my,” Connie says. “Well, did the Lord
speak
to you? Did he tell you
why
he was doing this?”

“Not directly, like what you might get in a phone call.”

“Oh, when I get a message from the Lord . . .” Connie pauses so that it will look like she’s a polite person. “Well, never you mind, hon.”

“Are you telling me, Connie, that the Lord will sometimes just up and speak out to you?” Myra makes herself laugh with a little picture in her mind, a picture of Mr. Sharpy lifting his leg and wee-weeing on Connie’s powder-blue ultrasuede suit that she bought in Southern Pines.

“Oh, yes,” Connie pauses and Myra can feel that stretched-lipped smile clean through the telephone. “When Mama passed, the Lord came and whispered to me,
Fear not
. Now what did you get, love?” Connie sounds like a child who might be comparing what Santy Claus brought to her to what the old guy brought another. But then, that’s how Connie lives her whole life, by comparison.

“Hmmm.” Myra stretches the phone cord and goes over to her window where she can see the light on in Alicia Jameson’s bedroom. While she is watching, a car pulls up and stops. A figure gets out and walks to the door. Maybe Jones is home! She strains to see better.

“What, dear?” Connie asks. “I can’t hear you. Do you think I need to come and sit a prayer vigil with you?”

The light on the Jamesons’ front porch goes on and in that instant Myra sees the stark bit of truth that ends the day. “No, dear, I’m fine alone,” she says. “But the Lord did speak to me. I wasn’t going to tell it at first, because I didn’t want anybody thinking that I’m crazy, but since you too on so many occasions have heard the Lord speak so clearly, I can tell you. The Lord said, ‘Myra, you’re a good-looking smart woman and so I have decided to do something that’s going to call a lot of attention to you.”

“He said all that?”

“He said, ‘I have put the body of Jones Jameson in your topsoil as a message.”

“Jones Jameson? He’s dead? Does his mama know?” Connie is going a hundred miles an hour. She wants to know if the family is having a visitation, will there be a service? But Myra says a quick goodbye and hangs up the phone. She stands there in the dark watching the house next door, waiting to see what will happen next. Maybe it was a sign, only she didn’t see God at all; as a matter of fact she saw somebody as far from God as you can get, she saw Howard, and exactly how he looked that day he was whispering with Old Mary Stutts Pur
day
. Maybe all this was meant to happen in some kind of grand scheme. Maybe Mr. Digby will bring her a new load of topsoil to make up for her discomfort. He said he would, didn’t he? He said he would, along with a little cow manure for good measure, manure so good and strong that it would burn some of the more tender plants if she wasn’t careful.