Cavedweller (28 page)

“Sad,” Delia whispered.

“Run, you sons-a-bitches!” The coach’s words were a roar, his contempt a palpable wave that lapped at Clint’s heart.

“Damn!” Clint shook his hand where the dwindling butt had burned him.

“Yeah.” Delia echoed his curse and tossed her half-smoked cigarette to join the others scattered on the ground. “Makes you wonder at the world, don’t it?”

She turned to him. She was hugging her coat close to her midriff, the expression in her eyes warmer than a smile. You all right, that look said. We know what we know, don’t we? Clint could not look away. I’m all right, he thought. An’t nothing wrong with me. Delia gave him a nod and walked off, resuming that murmured scrap of song.

Clint looked back at the runners. Two of them had fallen. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m all right,” he said, and pushed off the wall.

 

 

I
n his fever-heated sheets, Clint tried to roll to the side. His hip locked up with the old shortened tendons that ran down to his knee. Pain surged through the morphine fog. Delia had talked Dr. Campbell into raising the dosage, giving him respite and dreams cut loose of time. He had dreamed forward and back, every moment he ever had with Delia interspersed with flashes of his life before her and splintered visions of what would follow after him. The world was getting ready to let go of him, to swing him free. It was lifting him high and he could see far, to the girls grown up and hateful, and then back to himself an infant hanging on tight to a breast he could not imagine his mama had ever provided. Delia would go on forever. But he would not, and that was all right. He knew it finally. That was all right.

“Goddamn,” Clint moaned. His tongue was dry and stiff. Too much trouble to talk anymore. Damn, he said anyway. He said it in his head and felt himself start that journey again, swinging up and up. He heard the car coat drag on the wall and smelled cigarette smoke and rich wet dirt, the girl beside him and the years ahead, her blood on his hands and his own tears sliding down his face. He felt heat flare in his groin for the first time in so long he did not at first know it for what it was.

“Damn.” He said it out loud and swung high, as high as he had ever gone.

And let go.

R
everend Hillman officiated at Clint’s funeral. The crowd was small, though not so small as M.T. had promised Rosemary it would be. There were a number of women from Holiness Redeemer who had come with Grandma Windsor, some of the men from Firestone who had once worked with Clint, and at least a dozen patrons of the Bee’s Bonnet who no one had expected to come.

“Some of them must be here just to make sure he’s dead,” M.T. whispered to Rosemary as they stood under the canopy at the graveside. Rosemary covered her smile with her hand. M.T. had been cheerful and friendly from the moment she had gotten the call telling her that Clint had died, and Rosemary knew it was only partly relief that the man was gone. M.T. was not at all unhappy that Rosemary would be leaving in a couple of days, but neither was Rosemary. She had gotten her fill of the small Georgia town and been packed to leave for weeks. She had sworn to herself she would kick dirt on Clint Windsor’s coffin and was waiting for the crowd to clear so she could do it.

“When I get back to Los Angeles,” Rosemary whispered to M.T., “I’m going to one of those expensive day spas, get my whole body oiled and massaged and revitalized. You come visit me and I’ll pay your way. You will not believe how good you can feel.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that!” M.T. sounded tempted. She looked sideways at Steph, who was holding Lyle’s hand and trying to look sad with no success at all.

“You should. Los Angeles is a hell of a town for women our age, full of handsome young men ready to appreciate us older women of substance.” Rosemary smiled and put her arm around M.T.’s shoulders.

“Gigolos you mean.”

“Uh-huh, fine, strong, good-looking young gigolos. Just what the doctor ordered for tired blood and general malaise, and I don’t know about you, but after all these months I am suffering from malaise.” Rosemary squeezed M.T.’s arm and angled her body away from Grandma Windsor’s glare. The old woman had been giving her hateful looks since they left the church.

“The way you talk!” M.T. pressed her lips together to keep from giggling. Pity Rosemary disliked Cayro. She could learn to like this woman.

“Just like you,” Rosemary told her. “I talk like you. Why you think Delia likes us both so much? We got a lot in common, Marjolene Thomasina. More than just our friendship with Delia Byrd.” She turned her head and gave Grandma Windsor a big smile. Clint’s mother glared back at her and started walking away from the grave.

Cissy barely heard what Reverend Hillman said. She was thinking about her daddy. She remembered the time they had all gone to a funeral for some friend of his in a chapel filled with big baskets of flowers tied around with colored ribbons. Delia wore a velvet vest with a starburst sewn on the back in bright orange threads. Randall had walked around the little church with Cissy on his hip, hugging people and trading reminiscences. At one point he had picked her up and put her in a hamper of flowers, yellow daisies and pink and white mums in a mound so high the blossoms almost closed over Cissy’s head.

“Death is a change of circumstances,” said a guy wearing leather-wrapped braids and a tie-dyed shirt. He took a sip from a thermos and staggered.

Randall pulled Cissy out of the flowers all covered in pollen and petals. “Death is death,” he said angrily. He hugged Cissy close and glared at the man. “Funerals aren’t about death, they’re about how glad we are to still be alive.”

At Clint’s graveside, Cissy remembered the whole exchange clearly, though she hadn’t thought about it in all the years since. Afterward Randall had taken Cissy walking among the tombstones and made jokes about all the cement angels and concrete cherubs. “I’m going to be cremated,” he told her as they sat in the shade of a stumpy California oak. “Get rendered down to ash and bone and used as compost for some big old tree. I’ll turn into flowers and green glossy leaves.” He seemed cheerful about it, especially after all the solemn faces of his friends.

Cissy didn’t understand what everyone was so sad about. Randall had said that his friend was better off out of this life, that sometimes it was good to go on to feed the trees. At the gate to the cemetery, when he led her back to the long line of waiting cars, one of the drivers said something about hippies, and Randall laughed at him. “Yeah, we’re rich hippies,” he said, and swung Cissy up on his shoulders. She remembered Randall’s laugh and the way he talked about turning into green glossy leaves. That was what hippies did, she had thought at the time, throw parties for their friends and get turned into fertilizer.

It would have been good if Clint had had a little hippie in him. That last week before he died, he was constantly afraid. He had asked Delia to call Reverend Hillman, and cried while the minister sat with him. When Cissy went in, he had grabbed her hands in his knobby fists and held on so tight she thought he would crack her bones. At the end he had not been able to talk or sleep, just roll in the bed and groan until Delia got the doctor to give him more drugs. When he died, Delia shut the girls out of the room, and Rosemary helped her wash him and dress him in a dark wool suit. For the first time Clint looked like the man in Delia’s old pictures, stern-faced and fully dressed in clothes far too big for his wasted frame.

“Should bury him naked,” Dede said in a cracked voice.

“Should burn him,” Cissy whispered, and Dede gave her a look. “Turn him into ash and bone. Feed him to the flowers and the trees.”

Dede shuddered. “To the rocks, maybe. Feed him to the rocks and let the birds take the bones to use in their nests.” She had not wanted to go to the funeral, but Delia made them all go and stand in a line at her side.

When they got back to the house, Rosemary put her hand on Cissy’s cheek and smiled gently. “You okay, honey?”

The child reminded her of herself at that age, low on the totem pole in a house full of demanding, powerful voices. Cissy’s face looked pinched and worried.

“I’m fine.” Cissy shrugged off Rosemary’s hand.

“Grandma Windsor looked terrible,” Amanda said. “Her hair has gotten all ratty, and her neck looked awful, like a chicken’s.”

“Your grandmother is getting older, and it’s hard to lose a son,” Delia said calmly.

“I was thinking I should go out to see her.” Amanda’s tone was uncertain.

“If you want to,” Delia said. She didn’t look as bad as Grandma Windsor, but she looked bad enough. The shadows under her eyes were dark as the grapes in the basket of fruit someone had left on the porch that morning. Standing at the table where casseroles and foil-wrapped plates of meat crowded the fruit and several little pots of wilted flowers, she reached out to touch one of the covered bowls, then dropped her hand.

“I think I’ll lie down for a while,” she said. “I think I just need to lie down.”

Rosemary put her arm around Delia’s shoulders. M.T. came to the other side. Together they guided Delia down the hall. With every step Delia slumped a little more, until it seemed the two women were carrying her.

“What you want to bet she sleeps through till tomorrow?” Dede asked Cissy.

“Day after,” Cissy replied. “Or the day after that. I thought she was going to fall right down into the grave.”

“I thought Rosemary was going to fall in. Did you see how close she got after they lowered the coffin down?”

“I saw.” Cissy lifted one of the foil wrappers. She wanted something but it wasn’t food. Her head pounded and her eyes ached. “Allergies,” Rosemary had told her. “Your eyes are all swollen.” None of them wanted to acknowledge that she had been crying. Amanda had wiped her eyes a few times, but neither Delia nor Dede had shed a tear. Only Cissy looked and felt as stricken as Grandma Windsor. She kept thinking about Randall and his funeral before they left Los Angeles.

“You know what I want?” Dede had a piece of ham in one hand and a slice of white cake in the other. “I want a drink, a real drink, one of those mixed drinks people are always ordering on television. A gin and tonic or a whiskey sour.” She took a bite of ham and nodded solemnly.

“Yeah?” Cissy lifted her glasses and wiped her left eye. The corner was so tender it burned at her touch. Her expression was so sorrowful, Dede had to work to keep from laughing.

“What is it Rosemary drinks, bourbon or scotch?” Dede asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, whatever. Everything goes good with Coke. Let’s mix ourselves some drinks and have a picnic out back.”

“Do you think we should?” Cissy looked down the hall. She didn’t want to have to talk to M.T. or Rosemary, and especially not to Amanda.

“I think we damn sure should,” Dede said emphatically. “We’ll do it for Clint. He’s probably the only one in the house who would appreciate it anyway.”

 

 

T
here was scotch and bourbon left in the kitchen, though not much of either. Dede made the drinks and gave the scotch to Cissy, telling her she knew it was what Rosemary preferred, so it had to be good. After one sip Cissy suspected she had found the one thing that did not go well with Coke. After the second, she decided it was not so bad. It made the ham sandwich taste a lot better, and Dede announced that bourbon was going to be her drink of choice. They sat under the pecan trees near the garage, and after a while Cissy started to feel better than she had in a week. Maybe it was like Randall had told her, that death was not so terrible a thing. Dead, Clint had looked almost peaceful.

“What was your daddy like?” Dede was a little hesitant, but determined. “I seen his picture, read some stuff about him. Sounded like he was a crazy son of a bitch.” Dede was sitting against the far outside wall of the garage, holding the stub of a cigarette between two fingers. Cissy had thought Dede just pretended to smoke, but sitting out behind the garage, Dede had already gone through two of the butts she kept in her little metal tin. “I’ve been smoking for years,” she bragged, and the way she puffed it might have been true.

“He wasn’t crazy. He was just like anybody.” Cissy had her stubborn expression on, mouth pulled tight and eyes intent. “Liked to drive too fast. Got drunk too much. Was always on the move. Doing business, he called it. ‘Got to do some business, Little Bit,’ he’d say. ‘Keep it dry.’ ” She gave Dede a careful look. “I never knew what that meant.”

Dede shrugged. “You see him much?”

“When I was little, yeah. Sort of.” Cissy thought for a moment. Had she known Randall at all?

“Sort of?” Dede said wryly, as if she suspected Cissy of lying.

“Well, it was hard, you know.” Cissy frowned at the memory. “They were always traveling or in the studio, going places and doing things. When we still lived with him, there was Sonny and Patch. They worked for Randall, took care of the house, took care of everything. They’d look after me while the band was traveling.”

“You didn’t get to go on the bus?” Dede was disappointed.

“Not once I got older. Rosemary told me stories about when I was little and Randall and Delia would take me with them, how I would sleep backstage or in one of the bus seats. She even had pictures. There’s one that’s kind of famous where I’m with a bunch of other little kids and we’re all naked off at the end of the stage with a drum set. I don’t remember that at all.”

“You don’t remember much, do you?”

“Not what people wish I did.” Cissy grimaced. “I remember stuff. I. remember eating room service in hotels with Delia and Randall lying in bed on either side of me. And playing on escalators. I liked escalators a lot. I liked being with Delia and Randall, but I don’t know, it was the way things were. It was just the way life was. I didn’t know it was that different. And when I stayed home, that wasn’t so bad. I liked Sonny and Patch. They were good to me. They had a little boy of their own, Wren. He was my age, but he didn’t talk.”