The Evening Star (2 page)

“I hope it kills us, then this will be over!” she cried, as she was crying.

“I’m from Bossier City, and I ain’t about to be bullied by no truck,” Rosie said. She calculated that she now had at least a three-or-four-inch lead on the Toyota and was nerving up to make her cut to the right.

When Aurora calmed for the second time they were well down the road past the airport exit—she could see the skyscrapers of downtown Houston through the summer haze.

“I can no longer laugh without beginning to cry,” she reported, rolling down her window. She proceeded to mess with Texas to the extent of another fifteen or twenty Kleenex.

“You wasn’t really laughing, you was just mainly crying,” Rosie said.

2

“The unbearable part is that he likes being in prison,” Aurora said, finishing her second pig sandwich.

In the bleak hours after a visit to Tommy, the two of them had formed the habit of stopping at the old Pig Stand on Washington Avenue, in the hope that a little something to eat would help them lift their spirits off the floor.

Rosie, true to her recently acquired vegetarianism, which she hoped would enable her to live to at least one hundred, had a salad. Aurora ate an order of onion rings and two Pig Stand sandwiches.

“You won’t be the first person to commit suicide by eating fatty foods,” Rosie informed her.

“I’m serious,” Aurora said. “I think Tommy likes being in prison.”

“He don’t really like it,” Rosie said. “I doubt anybody really likes being in Huntsville.”

“No, but he prefers it to being outside,” Aurora said. “That’s the tragic fact. He prefers it to being out, which means that you and I totally failed him.”

“Maybe so, but you need to stop gnawing on it,” Rosie
said. “Gnawing on it’s worse than eating pig sandwiches. We done the best we could, and that’s all anybody can do.”

Aurora, realizing that it would be a biological outrage to consume three pig sandwiches at a sitting, nonetheless called the waitress and ordered a third.

“Well, I feel weak and empty,” she told Rosie. “You’re a wisp, compared to me. I can’t survive on desiccated lettuce.”

As she waited for her sandwich, Aurora reviewed—in memory—Tommy’s life, and realized sadly that she could not really remember having seen a truly happy look on his young face.

She had seen smart looks, though, and had hoped he might go on to win intellectual distinction, a hope that was probably ended by a single gunshot in a house in the Austin suburbs. Tommy shot at a rival dope dealer and hit the man’s girlfriend in the head. The girl, whose name was Julie, was from a military family in San Antonio, and had been Tommy’s first real girlfriend, whatever being a real girlfriend meant in contemporary terms.

“If only he hadn’t met that girl,” Aurora said, angered that such a mouse of a girl had brought such a harsh and bitter destiny upon them all. That Julie had been in some ways more than a mouse was borne out by the fact that $134,000 in cash and half a kilo of cocaine had been found in her closet, hidden beneath her large collection of stuffed animals.

Though Rosie’s heart ached for Tommy, too, she felt she had to take a stoic line on his tragedy, otherwise Aurora would mope for hours, behavior she couldn’t afford. Tommy was not the only problem they had to deal with.

“I didn’t much cotton to Julie either, but she’s dead, let her rest in peace,” Rosie said. “Tommy was a dope dealer. Them kinds of things just happen to dope dealers.

“If you ask me we’re lucky he didn’t shoot two or three people,” she added. “Tommy’s been mad at the world ever since his momma died.”

She thought for a moment, and amended her conclusion. “Actually, Tommy’s been mad ever since he was born,” she
said. “He’s one of those people who are just born mad, and it don’t do no good to look for a why because there ain’t no why you can find.”

“Thank you for your advice, O fount of wisdom,” Aurora said, casting her eyes toward the pies—there was a long line of them, in gleaming pie racks. Somehow, through the magic of lighting, the gleaming racks seemed to magnify the pies’ appeal. She knew the pies couldn’t possibly be as good as they looked, but that didn’t mean they weren’t fully good enough to eat. She waved at Marge, the waitress, and decided on mince, with pistachio ice cream.

Rosie watched Aurora eat the pie and the ice cream with silent, austere disdain, secure in the knowledge that she herself weighed only ninety-six pounds—whereas the other customers of the Pig Stand, a typical assortment of human flotsam and jetsam, most of them possessed of a fatigue not yet quite emptied of curiosity, merely wondered why Aurora, a woman who looked like she had enough money to eat elsewhere, kept showing up at the Pig Stand in the company of a frizzy-haired little old lady who, in their acute estimation, was some kind of Louisiana cracker.

Like many residents of the north side of Houston, most of the Pig Standers tended to take life steady and take it slow. A few chubby Don Juans in Hawaiian shirts mustered snap enough to flirt with Marge or one of the other waitresses, and a few truckers or delivery men, all too well aware that time is money, strode in, ate a cheeseburger or a few eggs, and strode out. But the majority of the customers were in no hurry; from long experience they had learned that the best way to handle the Houston humidity was to ease through it slowly, one step or one thought at a time.

Aurora was not quite ready to let go of her anger at the treacherous Julie. To her annoyance, Tommy himself had no interest in her anger, and would not react at all when Julie was mentioned.

“Julie was a little squirrely,” he had said, and that was all he said.

“There are often problems in military families,” Aurora remarked. She finished her pie and took out her mirror, but
she could not muster enough interest in her appearance to do anything about it. What was there would have to do—perhaps forever, but at least until they got home.

“The General’s from a military family,” Rosie reminded her. “He’s as much trouble as five or six military families, but I doubt he’s lost a wink of sleep in his life.”

“You’re quite wrong,” Aurora said. “I’ve caused him to lose thousands of winks of sleep. One of the few powers I can still claim is the ability to upset Hector sufficiently to keep him awake until I’m ready for him to start snoring.”

General Hector Scott, Aurora’s resident lover—a category not to be confused with that of the several nonresident aspirants—was eighty-six, and not happy about it; he was even less happy about the fact that only three weeks before, he had managed, in defiance of all the known laws of physics, to turn a golf cart over on himself, breaking both legs and one hip. He was recuperating, at a pace much too slow to suit him, on the glassed-in patio next to Aurora’s bedroom, on the second floor of her house.

The fact that he was in de facto confinement on the second floor was another thing General Scott was not happy about. Aurora had had him carried upstairs over his stern, almost violent, protests. The boys who brought him home in the ambulance, perhaps unaware that he had been a four-star general, took their orders from Aurora and ignored the thumps he attempted to give them.

General Scott at once concluded that Aurora could have had only one motive for consigning him to the second floor: she intended to make free with her other suitors on the first floor, where he could neither see, hear, nor interfere with anything she might decide to do.

The most threatening of the other suitors was a little Frenchman named Pascal, an attaché at the French consulate. The General couldn’t stand Pascal, and didn’t conceal the fact—indeed, General Scott concealed few facts, and in the past few months had even ceased to conceal certain parts of his own anatomy that both Aurora and Rosie would have preferred that he conceal.

This new propensity of the General’s was on both women’s
minds as they left the Pig Stand and prodded the old Cadillac along its homeward path, toward the well-tamed forests of River Oaks.

“Has he flashed lately?” Aurora asked. “Sinner that I am, I hardly thought that I could have committed enough sins to earn me a grandson in jail and a flasher on my patio.”

“Yep, he flashed this morning,” Rosie said. “Then he had the gall to complain about his eggs.”

“How, exactly, did he flash?” Aurora asked. “For an ancient person on crutches he’s developed quite an extensive repertoire.”

“He left his pajamas unbuttoned,” Rosie said. “I think the next time he goes that route I might spill a glass of ice water in his lap, or a little hot tea or something.”

“Yes, do that,” Aurora said. “At least he didn’t pull the crutches trick, which he’s very prone to pulling when I’m his target.”

“What’s the crutches trick?” Rosie asked.

“He hoists himself on his crutches and then contrives to let his bathrobe fall open,” Aurora said. “Then he just stands there grinning. He looks like a mummy on crutches.”

“Well, he’s eighty-six,” Rosie said, softening her stance a bit.

“Why is that relevant?” Aurora asked. “You yourself are not exactly a maiden, but you don’t stand around lolling out of your bathrobe.”

“I’m too flat-chested, there’s nothing to loll,” Rosie said. “We may not be no spring chickens but we ain’t really old like the General, either.”

Aurora gave her maid a quizzical look. “I’m afraid I don’t quite take your point, if you have one,” she said. “Is there any reason why the old shouldn’t be expected to behave as well as the middle-aged?”

“Middle-aged?” Rosie said. “Do you think we’re still middle-aged?”

“Well, why aren’t we?” Aurora asked. She opened the glove compartment and poked around in it hopefully—she had the vague suspicion that she might have hidden some money in it at some point.

“You’re kidding yourself,” Rosie informed her. “We ain’t been middle-aged for twenty years.”

To her delight, Aurora discovered just what she had been hoping to find: twenty-four dollars, tucked into a city map.

“Why, there’s my twenty-four dollars, let’s stop at the flower shop,” she said. “As for middle-aged, you’re quite wrong. There’s a category called late middle age which has rather indefinite boundaries. I think we’re both still well inside them—or at least I am.”

“The backyard’s nothing but flowers, why do you want to buy more?” Rosie asked. She was not keen on stopping at the flower shop.

“You’re right, go home—flowers are a job for Pascal,” Aurora said. “I’ll call him and tell him to bring over twenty-four dollars’ worth next time he shows up.”

“What if he don’t want to? Pascal ain’t rich, you know.” Rosie said.

“No, but I don’t see anything extravagant about asking him to bring me twenty-four dollars’ worth of flowers, since that’s the precise amount I found in my glove compartment,” Aurora said, grinning. “How could anyone argue with the logic of that?”

Rosie didn’t care about the logic—it was the first time Aurora had smiled since leaving the prison. If it cost Pascal twenty-four dollars, it was worth it.

Still, she had not quite finished making her point about the General and his new fondness for flashing. That was one subject, but it was connected to a second subject, and the second subject—of profound interest to Rosie—was whether Aurora and the General still had sex.

Obviously the General was plenty randy in his head, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was randy elsewhere, nor did it offer the slightest clue as to Aurora’s position on the matter. And Aurora, no prude, and no enemy of plain speech, either, had ceased to be either forthcoming or plain about that aspect of her life with the General.

Rosie ached to know, partly out of simple curiosity and partly because a little more information might help her with
a dilemma of her own—her boyfriend, C. C. Granby, once as feisty as a rooster, seemed to be losing his roosterlike propensities at an alarming rate. Rosie couldn’t figure out if it was her fault or his, and could not quite get up her nerve to apply to Aurora for an opinion.

“What I meant about the General not buttoning his pajamas or letting his bathrobe flop open is that we’re all getting old, and I guess old people have a right to get their kicks some way,” she said nervously.

They had just pulled into the driveway of Aurora’s home. Rosie covered her nervousness by beginning the lengthy business of aligning the Cadillac with the narrow doors of the garage. The car was nearly as wide as the opening—there was only a little more than an inch to spare on either side: another reason Rosie’s automotive fantasies were so focused on a Datsun pickup. Aurora, who otherwise could scarcely drive, always whipped the Cadillac right into the garage, whereas Rosie, who stubbornly refused to have her cataracts attended to, could scarcely see the width of the front seat and was always in terror of crumpling one of the fenders or scraping one of the doors, in which event she expected to be dismissed instantly despite more than forty years of faithful service.

“Stop!” Aurora commanded, looking at her maid sharply.

Rosie was just on the lip of the driveway; she liked to align the Cadillac as a golfer might a long putt, before committing herself to an approach that wouldn’t work.

“I’m getting it centered, I ain’t gonna scrape nothing,” Rosie assured Aurora, edging ever so slightly to the left in her approach to the garage.

“You stop!” Aurora said. “I want to talk to you and I want to do it right now. You can destroy my car a little later.”

Rosie stopped and sat looking at Aurora’s nice Spanish Colonial house. She had helped maintain it for so long that she considered that it was, in a sense, hers, too. At the moment she longed to be inside it—from the look in Aurora’s eye it seemed likely that her remarks about the aged and their kicks had not been well received.

“I ought to know when to keep my mouth shut, I guess,” she said, hoping to blunt the force of whatever attack might be coming.

“Oh, stop cringing,” Aurora said. “You ought to consider changing your hairdo. At the moment it’s far too frizzy.”

“I wish I was bald and had a wig,” Rosie said. “I’ve tried my hair every way there is to try hair, and look at it! Lots of wigs are nicer than my hair, but I don’t know . . . I guess I just ain’t the wig type. Every time I try one on I get the giggles.”