One Mississippi (6 page)

I didn’t find it amusing. I was already nervous about the Sky Blue tux and the whole prom thing and Mr. Frillinger’s lecture and Mrs. Frillinger’s frenzy of desperate need, and how the people at the HoJo stared at us, and now I could not stop sneezing. I mashed my nose with the wad of Kleenex.

My nose started buzzing. A sneeze exploded, and another —

“Daniel!” Tim yelled. “Get a grip on yourself!”

“If you could just roll down your —
Gachoo!
” I saw stars.

Dianne looked alarmed. “Are you okay?” She pressed the button, dropping her window. “You’re not getting the flu, are you?”

“It’s got to be psychosomatic,” said Tim. “He’s allergic to the prom.”

“Oh go to hell,” I said. “I can’t help it if I — Gaachoo!” A fierce twinge in my nose — my ears popped — my nose started to run. I mopped it with Kleenex.

“Daniel — you’re — oh no!” Dianne squealed. “Y’all, he’s
bleeding!
”

And so I was: that was blood running over my lip, into my mouth. I stared in cross-eyed horror at the sticky stuff coursing over the back of my hand. I tilted my head back, groping for Kleenex. The warm tang ran down my throat.

Debbie said, “My gosh, are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah — it’s just — subtimes I get dosebleeds,” I said into the tissue.

Dianne shrank back; I might bleed on her dress. “Oh you guys, he’s bleeding a lot!”

“Put a tourniquet on his neck, why don’t you,” Tim said.

That last sneeze had popped something loose, some vital point in my head. My second-to-last Kleenex was sopping with blood. Debbie got up on her knees to get a better look.

“Just relax,” I said. “It’ll stop in a biddit.”

“At least you quit sneezing,” Tim said. “I prefer the bleeding. It’s much quieter.”

We rolled past the vast pile of University Medical Center. Dianne said, “Y’all, he’s bleeding a lot. Maybe we should go to the emergency room.”

“Doe!” I cried. “Let’s just go to the
prob!
I’ll be
fide!
Just — would you talk about subthing else please? Iddything!” The river ran out the hole in my head, pumping out a steady warm stream. What if the bleeding never stopped and this was my life draining out of me? I didn’t want to die in the backseat of Tim’s father’s Buick.

“Don’t get blood on the seat,” Tim said.

Dianne scolded, “Tim! Please!”

Any minute now I would stop bleeding and this would become a great big hardee-har-har. We swung into the Holiday Inn parking lot, cruised slowly through a herd of promgoers. Tim found a spot under a tree. I kept my head back, resting on the shelf under the window. I saw girls in shiny prom dresses passing by, upside down.

My fingers scrabbled in the bottom of the box. “Tib, you got any more Kleedex?”

“Wait.” I heard Dianne rummaging in her purse. She pressed something soft and white into my hand, some kind of cottony pillow. I laid it against my face and smelled faint perfume, like toilet paper.

I realized what it was. I thought I might die.

I bled into it anyway. After a while the river slowed to a trickle, and stopped.

Gingerly I sat up. “I think I’m okay.” The dam seemed to be forming, and holding. “Yep, I think it’s good. Let’s go in.”

“You sure?” said Tim. “We don’t want to walk in there and your head explodes.”

That’s when I went to unfasten my seat belt and found that it would not open. The button was stuck. I pressed harder.

It would not open.

Everybody else got out of the car. I pressed with all my strength against the center button of the buckle. I engraved the Buick emblem in the flesh of my thumb. That little steel bastard was frozen in place as if it had been welded shut.

Tim leaned through the window. “You bleeding again?”

“No.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “Tim.”

“What.”

“The seat belt, Tim. It’s stuck.”

“What?
” His face lit up, pure joy — what a perfect fool I was! This was total humiliation, the kind you can hang on to and lord over a friend for the rest of your lives. Tim laughed, oh my how he did laugh. He had to step back from the car, he was laughing so hard. I would have laughed too, if it had been anyone other than me.

Debbie and Dianne crowded around. From their fussing and clucking you would think I had planned the whole thing, the nosebleed, the seat belt. I invited any of them to take a crack at the buckle. They all took a turn. No one could make it budge.

Tim had stopped laughing. “Why the hell did you buckle it in the first place?”

“I don’t know. I’m an idiot. What can I say?”

“Say it again,” Tim said. “Say ‘I’m an idiot.’”

“Tim, be nice,” Dianne said. “He didn’t mean to.”

Tim found a screwdriver in the trunk. We pried and scraped, trying to wedge it open. Suddenly Tim got all squirrelly about damaging the seat belt of his father’s fine car.

“Get back in the car,” he said. The girls obeyed. We drove through the stream of promgoers, two blocks up Mortification Avenue into the unholy glare of a Texaco station. The bellcord went
ding!
A greasy man in a gray shirt came out. The name-patch said Doug.

“We don’t need gas,” Tim said. “My friend has managed to get himself stuck in the seat belt back there. Do you think you can help get him out?”

Doug turned to see me in my frilly Sky Blue tux with the seat belt forever locked around my waist. His face lit up. His shout carried to the far garage bay. “Hey Raymond! Come get a loada this!”

Raymond came, carrying his big belly before him. He joined in with guffaws and clever remarks. He called the other fellows from the garage to have a look.

I groaned, and leaned back in the seat. Somehow that insignificant movement tore a hole in the dam in my nose. The spectators gasped as a rivulet of blood spilled across my lip. I flung back my head and groped for the sanitary napkin.

The Frillingers sat quietly, their eyes averted as from a terrible accident. I cursed myself. WHY in the HELL did you have to fasten the damn SEAT BELT you damn stupid MORON. Every molecule of my stupidity danced before me in midair. Why had I buckled up? Not for safety. What was I afraid of? That Dianne might try to snuggle up to me? Was that it?

Never has there been a bigger fool.

The sight of blood ran off all the spectators except Raymond and Doug, who squatted to examine the buckle. “Yessir,” Raymond announced, “that thing is flat stuck. What you thank, Doug?”

Doug nodded. “Have to cut it.”

“What do you mean?” Tim said.

“Cut the belt.”

“No way! That’ll ruin it!” Tim came around the car. “Can’t you pry it open? Don’t you have some kind of special tool for when this happens?”

“No,” said Raymond. “It’s stuck.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” I said. “It’s not my fault, Tim. It’s stuck.”

“Well I can’t let ’em cut the seat belt! My father will freak out! This car is brand-new! It’s his baby!”

“Well excuse bee,” I said. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Doug said, “I’ll get some shears.”

“NO!” Tim pounded the roof of the car. “You cannot cut the seat belt!”

I lifted the napkin. “Tim, for God’s sake. What am I supposed to do, sit here all night?”

“Fine with me,” he said.

“I can stay with you,” Dianne said.

“No,” I said. “No, we’re gonna cut the durn seat belt and we’re all gonna go to the prom, and I’ll buy your father a new seat belt, okay? So you can just shut up about it. Okay?” I felt light-headed. Watch me faint, like a girl in a novel — just keel over from loss of blood.

“I’ll never get to drive this car again,” Tim moaned.

“Look — it’s not my fault the precious seat belt is stuck!”

“Why the hell did you buckle it in the first place?”

We were skidding toward a collision. “Tim, one more word about the damn seat belt and I’m not gonna be the only one bleeding.”

Doug returned with a pair of shears. He looked at Tim. “You want me to cut it, or you want to do it yourself?”

Tim stepped back. He raised his hands in a posture of defeat. “You do it.”

Doug knelt beside me. Snip, snip, in one second I was free. He said no charge, but I handed him five dollars. (I’d have given him a hundred if I had it.) Doug crammed the bills in his pocket and said, “Y’all go on now, have fun at your party.”

“See there, everything turned out fine,” Dianne said. “Are you still bleeding?”

I checked. “Not much.”

Tim climbed back in the driver’s seat. “Okay,
nobody
fasten their seat belts, all right?” We rode in silence to the Holiday Inn. We could hear music throbbing from inside the building. Tim let his breath out slowly — like Dad when he was trying to keep from hitting us. “You ready now, Durwood?”

“You guys go ahead. I’ll just sit here till I’m sure the bleeding’s really stopped, then I’ll come in.”

Dianne said she would wait with me. I said sometimes it takes a while to stop all the way. “Y’all go on. I’ll be in soon.”

“You think it might stop faster if we leave you alone?” Tim said.

“Yeah.”

He popped open his door. “Come on, girls.”

“Okay, well . . . you hurry in, Daniel,” Dianne said.

The minute they left, the pounding of my heart began to slow, the flow of blood easing. I stared up through the window at the stars poking through the haze over Jackson. It could have been worse, I kept telling myself. It could have happened in front of everybody, instead of just Tim and the girls and some gas-station guys.

Maybe one day it would be funny, but not yet. It was still too humiliating. Also I’d seen a side of Tim I didn’t really want to see. No doubt we would go on being best friends, but I didn’t enjoy how ready he was to leave me strapped in his father’s backseat.

The pulse of “Back Stabbers” vibrated the air in the lobby. I went to the men’s room to dab at the bloody crust on my nostril. By some miracle I had managed to lose all that blood without getting a drop on my Sky Blue tuxedo.

The bathroom door banged open and there stood Larry McWhorter and Red Martin, star linebackers of the varsity team. Their bow ties were off, their faces flushed from dancing and probably drinking. Red hooted at the sight of me. “Jesus Gawd, would you look at ol’ Daniel Musk Ox?” he cried. “Howdy, Musk Ox! Where’d you get that tux at, Nigger Mart?”

I tossed the bloody napkin in the trash. “Brant and Church.”

“Nigger Mart!” Larry snickered. “Good one, Red! Hey, Musgrove, who’s your date tonight — Arnita Beecham?”

“In his dreams,” Red said. “No, he’s already got a little wifey at home. Tim Cousins.”

I combed my crew cut and pretended to ignore them. They took up positions at the urinals and jacked their feet apart in manly fashion.

“Man,” Red said, “did you get a load of her titties in that goddamn dress?”

“Mm, mm,” Larry said, “sweet li’l ol’ Hershey kisses.”

I could have just slipped out the door, but with bullies it was important to show you were not intimidated. “I never noticed Arnita’s tits till she put on that dress,” I said, in the spirit of good fun between guys.

“You wouldn’t notice tits on a bull,” Red said, “cause you got your head stuck up your ass, jackass.”

Larry haw-hawed at that. I grinned in a good-natured way. “Jeez, Red, with your talent for repartee you oughta go on Johnny Carson!” I got out the door before he could work up an answer.

Beside the double doors was a folding table manned by Coach Rainey and Mrs. Passworth, my algebra teacher. It was strange to see the coach in sport coat and necktie, even stranger to see Mrs. Passworth in a purplish satiny evening dress with pleats and bows and a generous view of her freckled bosom. “Well hello, Daniel, don’t we look handsome tonight!” she exclaimed. “Ticket?”

“Tim Cousins has it. They already went in.”

“Oh, right. He said you were having the most awful nosebleed! You poor thing, are you okay?” She put a kindly hand on my arm.

“I’m fine. Can I go in?”

“I’m sure you were just nervous,” she said. “Go right in, have a wonderful time!”

A blast of warm air and music blew through the doors with a herd of chattering girls. I straightened my shoulders and walked into the prom.

My first instinct was I was in the wrong place, who were all these people? My classmates had been transformed — the girls glowy and fancy in their formals, hair piled to unnatural heights or teased and sprayed into clouds of curls. The boys looked handsome and grave in their tuxes. The spatter of light from the huge disco ball made everyone glamorous. To my relief I spotted several bright pastel tuxes — Mike Patterson wore a creamy yellow one, Greg Ptacek a Sophisticated Squire in Lime Green.

Crepe paper twirled with glitter-painted stars in the streams of colored light. The room was crowded, warm, thrilling, like I imagined a glamorous nightclub might be. A disc jockey was spinning records beside the dance floor jammed with couples swaying to Seals and Crofts, “We May Never Pass This Way Again.” A sprinkling of teachers stood by, ready to break up any sexy dancing.

“There you are!” Dianne seized my arm. “How’s your nose?”

“Fine. Cool decorations, huh?”

“Listen, if you need it, I’ve got another — thing in my purse. Just in case.”

It was too dark for her to see me blush. “Thanks. I’m okay now. Where’s Debbie and Tim?”

“Dancing! You wanna dance?”

The past two Saturdays I had watched
American Bandstand
and imitated those kids, the cool sweep of the arm and the juking thing with the feet. Janie came in and caught me in the act, and laughed so hard I had to quit. Now Dianne tugged me by the hand to the dance floor.

It was jammed, everybody shuffling in place. In that crowd no one looked significantly more ridiculous than anyone else. You can do this, I told myself. You can. I tapped my feet, snapped my fingers, grinned at Dianne. The beat was easy to follow. I found myself almost enjoying it.
You can get through this, try not to think how spastic you look.

The lights made a shine on Dianne’s face. She’d taken off her glasses, so her eyes looked naked and puffy, but they were nice eyes, the eyes of a girl having fun on her first date with me. A lot of steel in her smile. I gave her a smile in return. This was not so bad.