Imaginary Men (18 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Literary Collections, #Literary Criticism, #test

BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 112
Companion Planting
At Christmas, while I visited my new grandson in North Carolina, I wrote to Alice every day on the prettiest postcards I could findBat Cave, Blowing Rock covered with bluish snow. I stopped twice on the road home, once to buy her shelled pecans and once for a poinsettia plant. When I crossed the Florida line I called her. "You'll be a sight for sore eyes," she groaned. "Can you come over right away, Cleland?"
In spite of all that had happened in the last few months, when I heard her voice I missed that blond hair blazing in the sunshine and that nice smile of hers. A good-looking woman, even at fifty-five. "Anything wrong?" I asked.
 
Page 113
"Just a surprise," she said. Then she blew me some kisses over the phone and hung up.
Surprise. That could mean trouble. It was the same word Alice had used when she stopped by the feedstore last April to tell me her niece Jackie was moving to Florida. "I figure she can fit her little single-wide right between your trailer and my A-frame, temporarily," Alice had said excitedly. "I've got it all worked out in my mind."
I didn't doubt it. When Alice had something worked out in her mind, it might as well be standing and breathing and talking in front of you. She explained that Jackie was a certified PE instructor in California and that she'd lost her job and her fiancé the same week. "She calls it 'bad karma,'" Alice had said.
I told her any kin of hers was kin of mine. It was almost truetwo weeks before I'd bought her a diamond solitaire at Thurgood's. We hadn't set a date yet, but Alice, being a Roman Catholic, put a lot of stock in engagements. It was the third ring I'd given to a woman. You might say I'm an old hand at it.
Now the rows of pines fanned out as I sped down the dirt road to Alice's place. I passed the beef steer in his small pasturea cleared area with a bathtub and a bale of hay. His ears stood up and followed me like radar dishes. He was nearly big enough to slaughter.
The setter, her whole body wagging, met me at the path. I heard music throbbing from Jackie's trailer. The words of the song were garbled, like people screaming into the wind. I knocked on the door of Alice's A-frame. No answer. I walked back to the barnyard. One of the milk goats baaed at me over the fence rail, her udders hard and full. The place had the feel of something gone wronga stillness, like when you find the cattle loose in the sugarcane, bloated and woozy from overeating.
I heard banging from the barn, then Alice's voice. "Damn you!" she hollered. The new foal bolted through the dutch doors and galloped off toward the mares. Alice appeared, wrapping a blue halter around her arm like a bullwhip. "Glory be," she said, and waved to me. From Jackie's trailer the pitch changed, and a woman belted out the song "What's Love Got to Do with It?"
"Listen to that racket, will you?" Alice took both my hands. "I really missed you."
"Me too. What's going on around here?" I nodded toward the trailer.
 
Page 114
"Jackie's driving me crazy."
"She's taken up rock and roll music?"
"Worse than that." Alice opened the door to her A-frame. "She's taken up with a man."
"I don't believe it."
She opened the refrigerator and took out two beers. We sipped, then kissed, our mouths cold and wet.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
We had to knock hard on Jackie's trailer door. Finally she appeared, wearing a housedress covered with parrots and flowers.
"Welcome back," she said, clapping me hard on the shoulder. "Come on in and join the party." I looked into the dark living room. A man was sitting on the sofa, his boots up on the coffee table.
"Who's this?" I asked. The man stood and walked toward me, moving a big chaw of tobacco from one cheek to the other.
"Name's Hudson," he said.
"Cleland, meet my new fiancé," Jackie said.
"How do," he said. We shook hands. He was real thin, this Hudson, with long, slicked-back hair. He was wearing spurs, a tight denim jacket, and jeans. His voice was quiet and polite.
"Flip the tape over, will you, honey?" Jackie hooked a finger in one of his belt loops and pulled. I took a slug of my Bud and coughed as I whispered to Alice, "How long?"
"She's been catting around with him since the day before Christmas," she whispered back.
"Hudson's got a booth at the Waldo flea market," Jackie said.
"I sell collectibles." Hudson inserted the cassette. "And smoked turkeys and hams for the holidays."
"That's how they met," said Alice. "We had smoked turkey for Christmas supper."
"A real good meal," Hudson told Alice. "I appreciate the way you all been treating me." He looked me in the eyes as if to ask, Are you gonna make trouble for me? "Alice showed me the beautiful ring you give her. Hope I can buy Jackie one like it someday." He reached his skinny arm up and around Jackie's shoulders.
Alice set her beer down on the table. "Jackie, I told you this morning we need to talk."
 
Page 115
Willie Nelson began singing "Always on My Mind." Jackie joined in.
"Jackie," Alice began again. "I've got to talk to you about the chores."
"That's our song," Jackie said, closing her eyes. Hudson pushed her chin sideways with his fist in a mock punch.
"Why don't you sing it, then, while you milk the goats or clean the hog pens?" Alice was getting riled, but Jackie just slouched down into the sofa cushions. Alice stamped her foot. "Jackie! You're not listening. Did you hear what I said? Even the cabbage is going to seed. It doesn't make sense after all the work we put in."
"I guess I'm just a fool in love," Jackie said, lighting a cigarette Hudson had rolled for her.
"I guess I'm the fool!" Alice snapped.
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Jackie had arrived in late April, bringing her trailer and an old cat named Harmony. She was a tall, broad-built woman, flat as a board front and back, with short, frizzy red hair. The first thing she said when she got out of her car was, "Looks a little bit like California." Then she threw herself on Alice and cried about her ruined romance and her unemployment. "I'm swearing off men," she said. "No matter how good a shape you're in, your heart can still be broken."
At first things picked up for her. She got a job right off teaching PE part-time at Archway High. She hooked up her trailer between Alice and me and minded her own business. But only two weeks after starting, she lost her job in an argument over coed football. "Florida sure is behind the times," Jackie told us, waving her pink slip like a flag on the Fourth of July.
That night Alice and I were lying in bed jay-naked. Alice said, "What am I going to do with her? She's so damn independent. I told her this wasn't California, that people don't change their ways so quick here."
"I have a cousin who moved to California to raise cantaloupes," I said. "He's not so independent."
"It's not the same thing," Alice explained. "See, Jackie never lived anywhere but California."
I kissed Alice, but she couldn't keep her mind off Jackie.
 
Page 116
"She's thirty-nine years old and got nothing going for herself." Alice smoothed back the hair from my forehead. I poked at the little dimple she has below her waist. "I told Jackie she could stay here permanently, Cleland, if she wants to."
I felt myself being wrapped around her little finger. But it was Alice's property, and the bed was warm and she smelled so good that I didn't care. Then Alice rose up on one elbow and commenced to pull the hair on my chest with gentle tugs. All my women have done that, even my first wife, who died in childbirth at the age of twenty. Alice told me Jackie had a plan for them to become totally self-sufficient, to live off the land. It wouldn't affect her pension, either. They'd buy livestock and farm the place, not just a few laying hens like she had now.
"How're you gonna do that with most of your twenty acres already planted in pines?" I asked.
"Jackie got a bunch of books from the library. Young women today are resourceful," Alice said. I buried my head between her breasts and rooted around a little. "It'll work out, you'll see," she said. "You can get us a discount at the feedstore. That'll help some."
For the next few weeks when I came home from work, I found Alice and Jackie digging up the backyard and nailing wood slats together. Jackie showed me diagrams of their garden, explained that she'd take the chicken lime and toss it right into the compost heap. Everything was going to be organized and energy efficient. Intensive gardening, she said. Nothing wasted. The garden would be grouped into what Jackie called happy combinations of crops by companion planting.
"
What
planting?" I asked.
"Companion plantingputting crops together so they strengthen each other. Beneficial paining," she said. "Marigolds smell bad to most bugs. Garlic repels them, too. Sunflowers make nice shade for bush beans." She went on down the list. According to Jackie, every pest from tomato hornworms to aphids could be avoided if the right companions were planted.
Alice lapped up every word of it. I'm a Georgia boy. I've worked in cane fields and cornfields and soybean fields, but I'd never heard of "plant partners" or seen crops laid out in circles. Still, I wanted to show the women I was behind them one hundred percent. So I bought them a young steer.
 
Page 117
"How cute!" Jackie said when I coaxed him out of the truck. She ran into her trailer and returned with a bottle of Coca-Cola. Then, sprinkling a few drops of it on the steer, she said, "I christen thee Sir Loin." The animal licked the soda off his muzzle and blew out through his nose.
"He ought to fill your freezer without too much waste," I said.
Jackie stood there, running her finger around the rim of the bottle. She looked at Alice and scraped her feet in the sand. "You'll have to feed him," she told me. "If he's going to be butchered, I'm sure neither of us could bear to get to know him personally."
"That's right," Alice said. "I draw the line at chickens."
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The first time Jackie saw Alice and me leaving for square dancing I thought her eyes would fall out. "Petticoats!" she screamed. Then she positioned Alice in the middle of the living room and asked her to twirlfirst slow, like a figure on a music box, then so fast that Alice's skirt blew up to a bell shape. "That's really quaint," Jackie said, clapping her hands. Alice pointed the toe of her shiny black shoe.
I hooked my fingers in her green satin cummerbund that matched my shirt. "You look like a prize at the county fair and good enough to eat." I pulled her to me as we stepped into the cool night air.
"She looks like an antique," Jackie said, closing the door behind us.
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By the end of May the women had moved the chickens to their new coops and built all the animal pens. They bought two milk goats and five shoats. They took in a stray for a watchdoga twitchy red setter who wagged her tail at everybodyand gave each animal a name.
Jackie got a part-time job at Mrs. Yancy's thoroughbred farm. She was on duty nights with the pregnant mares. All her salary went for calf manna, hay, growing mash, laying mash, goat chow, and minerals to balance the soil. The backyard looked like mole had been set loose in it. Piles of black muck, dolomite, and perlite were added to the sandy soil, a shovelful at a time. All my life I thought loving a

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