Gods in Alabama (17 page)

Your mama could give us a reception in the fellowship hall at church one Sunday after services.”

Burr widened his eyes. “You’ve just described every man’s dream wedding.”

The story was pushing at me again. There are gods in Alabama. The urge to tell, to spill everything out onto his lap, to set it down and rest, washed over me in a wave. “Can it be soon?

Really soon?” I said.

“Baby, I’m good to go the day we get home,” said Burr. “You’re worried about being pregnant?”

I boggled at him because, stupidly, that hadn’t occurred to me.

I started counting days, working backwards in my head. “It’s not likely,” I said. “But when I was a girl, my aunt Florence always said to me and Clarice, ‘If you are on the battlefield, you can get shot.’ ”

Burr smiled at that. “Soon, then,” he said.

“Really soon,” I said, and he nodded. “And let’s lie.”

Burr said, “That seems a little—”

I interrupted him. “You know, nothing like sex can happen at my aunt’s house. Thin walls. I would die. But if we tell them we’re already married, we can sleep in the same room.”

“Sold,” said Burr. “I’m pro-lie.”

“All right, then,” I said, and ate a little popcorn. “Is your cell phone charged? I think I’ll do better on the phone. It’s been a long time since I told a lie. And maybe you better pull off the highway. I feel like I might need room to walk if I’m going to do this.”

Burr took the next exit. There wasn’t anything there but a Shell station with an attached diner, surrounded by rolling Alabama pastureland on one side and woods on the other. Burr was heading for the Shell, but I said, “Don’t pull in. I don’t want the people or the truck noise.” He cruised a few hundred feet before pulling onto the shoulder.

I said, “You get out, too. I might need the moral support.” We were next to a rail fence surrounding a long, thin pasture. Two fat ponies and a creaky old horse were ambling about in it.

When we got out, the ponies glanced up and then went on graz-ing, but the horse started meandering slowly over to investigate.

He was a swaybacked, ancient yellowed thing with a Roman nose. The hair around his mouth had gone entirely gray.

Burr, a city boy to the core, watched the horse suspiciously while I dialed. He said, “Do you think he’s upset I parked here?”

“No, I think he just sees the popcorn bag,” I explained. “It’s ringing.”

“Arlene?” said my aunt Flo. “This better not be you.”

“It’s me,” I said.

“I said it better not be,” said Aunt Flo. “What’s the excuse this time? Aliens abducted you back to Chicago? You suddenly had to take a side trip to Guam? Lay it on me, Arlene, I have been waiting for this call all day.”

The horse reached the fence and put his nose over. Burr took an ultra-casual step back and leaned nonchalantly on the car.

“I’m not calling to cancel, Aunt Flo. We’re about two hours away. Maybe less.”

I tilted my head and pushed my shoulder up to secure the phone, then dug out a small handful of popcorn for the horse. I offered it on the flat of my hand, and he started nuzzling it up with his prehensile lips. A few kernels of popcorn fell to the ground. I couldn’t tell if my hands were shaking or if the old horse had knocked them off.

“Lena,” Burr whispered urgently, “should you be doing that?”

I flapped the popcorn bag at him because I couldn’t hear Aunt Florence.

“—not calling to say hey, so you might as well spit it,” Florence was saying.

The fatter pony’s ears pricked up when he noticed the horse was getting something, and he started over at a trot. The second pony followed him. They were pretty, brown roly-poly things.

The fatter one’s sides jiggled as he trotted over.

“Now look what you did,” whispered Burr.

“Aunt Florence, I just wanted to call before we got there and explain why we stopped over last night.” I took a deep breath and did it. I lied, flat and plain. “Yesterday we stopped in Tennessee and got married.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. The ponies arrived at the fence and flanked the horse, questing forward with their noses and trying to press him out. I held out popcorn for the fatter one first, as he seemed the most desperate about it. I was happy for the distraction. If I thought about feeding ponies, it was easier to let lies slip out of my mouth, almost as if I wasn’t noticing them.

“He could take your finger right off,” whispered Burr. “Look at those teeth.”

I shook my head at him and almost dropped the phone.

“Married,” said Florence in a dire, deep voice. “You got married.”

“Yeah, we pretty much did,” I said.

“Well. Thank you so, so much for calling to tell me this.” Sarcasm flooded the phone and spilled out, soaking me. “I appreci-ate the news bulletin. Is there anything else you want to tell me while you are passing on this tidbit? Is your new husband that your family has never met an ex-convict, for example? Or are you just knocked up?”

As she spoke, I wiped my horse-feeding hand on my jeans and grabbed the phone, holding it a little away so Burr could hear.

The cell phone’s tiny speaker distorted Aunt Florence’s powerful voice, and from this distance it sounded like nothing more than the quacking of an enraged duck. I put the phone back to my ear.

“I’m not pregnant, and he’s not a convict. I told you, he’s a lawyer. But while I’ve got you, I guess I should tell you he’s black.”

I clipped the phone between my chin and shoulder again.

There was a long silence. I shared out another handful of popcorn among the horse and the ponies. Burr was watching me, rubbing his hand across his lips.

Finally she said, “What do you mean, he’s black? You mean he himself is black? A black man?”

“Yes. By black, I mean he is black.”

Florence took a deep breath and then spoke, her voice dead cold. “I am hanging up now, Arlene. I will take this up with you and your secret black husband when you arrive.”

“Yes, you’d better go quick,” I said. “You have less than two hours to get on the horn and tell everyone that Arlene married a black man just to piss you off. I wouldn’t want Aunt Sukie to have live kittens if you don’t get to prep her before Uncle Bruster’s party. We have a large extended family—may I suggest a phone tree?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“A phone tree,” I said. “It’s where you tell everyone you call to call two more people, and they tell their people to call two more—”

“Don’t sass me. I head the Baptist Women’s League, I think I know what a phone tree is, Arlene. We will discuss this further if you actually show up, with or without your secret and possibly made-up black husband. I am not stupid, Arlene. I guess now I am supposed to say, ‘Oh no, if you have invented a secret black husband, then you can’t come home and ruin your uncle’s special day, so scamper on back to Chicago with my blessing.’ Is that your plan?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I am not making Burr up. You know I never lie.” I stopped speaking abruptly, because saying that I never lied was a lie now.

“Oh yes, that’s right,” said Aunt Florence. “You don’t lie unless your mouth is open and words are coming out of it.” And then she hung up.

“I don’t usually lie,” I said to the dial tone. I hit the red button and handed Burr his phone back. The horse stamped a front foot, and the ponies gazed at me in popcorn-induced adoration.

“That’s all,” I said. “Go graze, you spoiled things.” But they didn’t speak English, so they stayed at the fence, craning their hopeful noses at me.

“I’m terrible at this,” I said to Burr. “I don’t lie ever.” My hands were shaking. Fornicating had been much easier.

“I know, baby,” he said. We got back in the car and buckled in.

“I shouldn’t have lied. I shouldn’t have even called. This gives her time to line up snipers around the driveway.”

Burr merged back onto the highway. I turned the stereo on and slipped in one of Burr’s Skip James CDs. I was in a blues kind of mood. I jacked it up pretty good, and James’s eerie falsetto filled the car. I didn’t feel like talking. Burr seemed to catch my mood and drove us silently, one hand tapping out odd rhythms on my thigh.

We listened to the CD twice through, and just as it was starting over, we hit the turnoff onto Route 19. I turned down the volume and told Burr to hang a left.

“If we kept going, we’d come to Fruiton,” I said. “This way, in about ten minutes we’re going to shoot through scenic downtown Possett. I believe it is obligatory to make the standard small-town joke, so allow me to say ‘Try not to blink.’ ”

“Check,” said Burr.

We wound our way down 19, passing through all three blocks of downtown Possett and then through clutches of ranch houses.

After that, there were lengthy stretches with nothing but fields on either side of us. In another four miles, we started to see a few houses again.

“Coming up ahead on the left,” I said, “that’s Mrs. Weedy’s house we’re passing. She died five or six years ago, and I don’t know the folks who took it. That big fence is around my aunt Florence’s vegetable garden, and that white frame up ahead, that’s us. Turn in the gravel drive, that concrete one will take you back around to the garden and the shed.”

The house looked just the way I remembered, neat and tidy, with its green shutters and door gleaming. The hydrangea bushes out front were trimmed and orderly. Florence had put some sort of blooming creeper in the front bed, and its big white flowers were bobbling lazily as if they were nodding at us. Florence and Bruster had come out on the front porch and were sitting in their respective rockers, watching for us. Burr slowly crept us up the gravel drive. He stopped short of the carport, and we got out and walked around to the front of the house.

They rose together as we approached, Florence in one of her nice housedresses, sinewy and tall. Uncle Bruster stood behind her, a great big bear of a man with sloping shoulders and tufts and wisps of gray-blond hair sticking up on his bald head. He looked like he had put on some weight.

I was surprised by how much ten years had aged him, while Aunt Florence looked just the same. With a shock, I realized that she had looked dried and gaunt and twenty years older than she should have when she first came up to rescue me and drag my mother back to Alabama. She had done all her aging when my cousin Wayne died, and Bruster, who was her senior by several years, was only now catching up.

Aunt Florence’s mouth was firm and her gaze was hard, unwavering, but her big hands betrayed her. They were clamped together in front of her, and her dry fingers were worrying at her wedding ring. She had long spider-thin fingers with big knuckles like knees, and her band hung loose and spun as she twisted at it. Uncle Bruster was sizing Burr up with cool blue eyes, but Florence barely spared him a glance. Her eyes were fast on me.

“There you are, then, Arlene,” she said as I approached.

“You’re still no bigger than a minute.”

Burr was coming up behind me, and I felt better knowing he had my back. “Yep, I’m still me.” They came down the steps, and we met on the strip of sidewalk in front of the flower bed.

The bigheaded blooms on the creeper were nodding so cheerfully that I wanted to stamp them down and smash them into stillness.

“This, I take it, is your husband?” said Florence. She nodded towards Burr without looking at him, her eyes steadfast on me.

“Yes, this is Burr. Wilson Burroughs, I mean. Burr, this is my aunt and uncle, Bruster and Florence Lukey.”

“Ma’am,” said Burr, politely nodding. He held out his hand to Bruster and said, “Nice to meet you.”

After a brief pause, Bruster took his hand and pumped it briskly up and back down. “Hey howdy,” he said, in an inappropriately grave tone. I felt a bubble of absurd laughter building in the back of my throat and quashed it. Uncle Bruster let go of Burr’s hand, and Burr put it on my shoulder, anchoring me.

“Your mama’s up in the house watching one of her shows,”

said Florence, her eyes flicking to Burr’s hand on my shoulder and then back to my face.

“I guess we better go on in and say hey,” I said.

“Yes, I guess you better,” said Florence. But as I stepped forward, her big hands shot out at me, as if her arms were on springs. I flinched, but she didn’t hesitate, grabbing me and yanking me forward against her. My face was squashed on her unyielding breastbone, and she was pressing her nose into the top of my head, burrowing into my hair, breathing me in. She smelled of waxy, sharp lemons and ammonia, as if she had scrubbed her dry body down with Pledge and Mr. Clean right before we arrived. Her smell was so shockingly familiar and homey that I found myself clutching at her back and squeezing her as hard as she was squeezing me.

She let me go just as abruptly, and Burr’s hand came back to my shoulder, steadying me. I blinked hard, twice. “Ten years is too long,” she said. “You little turd.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, quavery.

Then Bruster grabbed me and gave me a great big leathery bear hug, whispering, “Hey, girlie,” in my ear. I had forgotten that, how he always called Clarice and me his girlies.

“Arleney?” I heard my mother say, and I looked over Uncle Bruster’s sloping shoulder. Mama had come to the screen door.

Bruster let me go, and I walked up onto the porch, Burr following close behind.

Mama had aged, too, hard and badly. Her little pretty face was mired in a lined sea of fat, and her blond hair was stringy and faded to the point of being colorless. She was wearing some sort of awful red-print muumuu with big green fronds and yellow blooms splashed all over it. The muumuu had short sleeves, and her doughy arms quivered as she clapped her hands. “There’s my girl,” she said. She held open the door for us, and we went on in, Mama patting ineffectually at my shoulder as I passed her.

“There she is,” she said again.

“Burr, this is my mama,” I said.

“Ma’am,” Burr said again, shaking her hand.

“You’re a lawyer, Flo says?” Mama said, patting vaguely at his shoulder and keeping the hand he’d extended clutched in her paw.

“Yes, ma’am, I am,” said Burr.

Mama turned to me and said, “He doesn’t talk very much like he’s black, does he? I mean, if we were on the phone, I would probably guess he was black. He has a black voice, but he doesn’t talk black.”