The Music of Your Life (30 page)

And that is just exactly what Claudia Davenport Shields is:
Tobacco Trash
, and as true Tobacco Trash she cannot get rid of that accent to save her natural life. And the worst thing: Claudia is always having to do little sponsor spots on her show, most of which are for PET Milk, whose simple slogan is this: “Get PET.” But Claudia, ex—Miss Flue-Cured, the veritable pride of Cliston, and Coastal Carolina's pathetic answer to Jane Pauley, always says it so it sounds like this: “
Git
… PET.”

I watch Claudia make a fool of herself conducting an interview with the mayor of Duck Island, my mayor, I should say, whose name is Hiram Clark.

Claudia:
“Mr. Mayor, we're so honored to have you with us today. I know you took time out from your busy schedule just to come to the studio.”

His Honor:
“Well, Claudia, you know I always like to visit with you all here at
Carolina in the A.M.
”

Claudia:
“Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Now, what I want to ask you about this morning is, of course, what's on the mind of everyone here on Duck Island and Marsh County, which is the investigation into that poor missing child, Donny Tyndall. Now Mr. Mayor—”

And I listen as Claudia and the mayor just repeat the same old information with no new developments, and with Claudia, of course, acting real concerned and condolencey, which is simply wrong since I know Donny is still out there somewhere. Claudia is a master at putting on “serious” faces and nodding her head to indicate comprehension.

But now Claudia has moved right along—heartlessly, to my way of thinking—to a segment about how easy it is to macramé pot holders from scraps of yarn you might have lying around in some drawer somewhere, and what an excellent Christmas gift that would make, et cetera et cetera, and I just have to snap bottle-blond Tobacco Trash right off my TV set, as who wouldn't when faced with that kind of sadly insincere faux journalism.

I get up and start pacing around the room. I'm so mad, so mad that I want to throw things, and maybe even cry, because now I'm convinced I'm going to turn out to be as bitter and hateful as my grandmother Florence Moss was when she got to the age of forty, a legacy of spite and hatefulness which lasted to the end of her life (eighty-eight, which meant forty-eight years of crotchety meanness and the ill winds of bad moods blown at everyone who came within thirty feet of her), and here I am thirty-four years old, which is not all that far from forty, and I'm thinking why did I bother even getting out of bed, and to hell with Dionne War-wick's
Valley of the Dolls
philosophy. Maybe I like being on that damn merry-go-round all the time, what the hell.

I decide this is as good a time as any to try Mama and Daddy again—either they'll just make me madder or they'll calm me down, and I'm game for either one.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Mama.”

“Talbert? Oh my Lord, Talbert, are you all right? I can't believe you've called me. What in the world? Don't tell me you're out of the bed?”

She doesn't give me a chance to answer, just starts screaming out for Daddy, who must be in another part of the house, probably fixing something that might not even have been broken in the first place just so he didn't have to stay in the same room with her all day long.

“Dixon! Dixon, it's Talbert!”

And she adds, real loud, so that I, and perhaps a few neighbors, can hear: “Our
son
, Dixon! He sounds like he might be outa the bed, which would be a full-blown miracle!
Dixon!
Good Lord, what are you doing? Pick up the extension phone in Mama's room. It's a miracle, I'm telling you. Dixon!
Dixon!
Pick up the damn telephone!”

And obviously Dixon manages to get himself to the Miracle Hotline, and I'm thinking how Dionne Warwickish and Psychic Friends—like this is.

Daddy:
“T.J.?”

“Yes, it is I, Daddy.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear it. You feeling better, son?”

“I guess so.”

Mama:
“Talbert, tell me something. Are you finally on some sort of a medication?”

“Oh, nothing special,” I say, in a calm voice, looking down at my nails for a “nonchalant” effect, though of course there's no one to witness it. “Only a few over-the-counter dolls. Mostly, I just felt like getting out of bed. I guess it's just the Lord's will.” I like to say things that I know Mama likes to hear.

“Well, perhaps it is the will of the Lord,” she says, because she knows that I can get just as sarcastic as she can, and that we can give it back and forth to each other. “Anything good that happens is the Lord's will, Talbert.”

“What about the bad stuff that happens, Mama?” I say. “Is that the Lord's will too?”

“Talbert, don't get me riled up in a theological discussion, I'm in the middle of cleaning the house and I don't have time to think. Perhaps if you had warmed any kind of a church pew in the last six months, you wouldn't need to be asking big theological questions of a lay person like myself. You need to go talk to Reverend Stubbs—”

“Loralee, please …” Daddy says, much to my relief. “T.J., you sure you're all right?”

“Well, Dixon,” Mama says, “he said he was. If he picked up the phone, he must be! It's not up to us to question the Lord's mysterious work.”

“I want to hear it from Talbert, if you please.”

“Yes, Daddy, I feel fine.”

“Well, I am relieved and mighty glad to hear it, son, I'll tell you that.”

Mama says, “No one will ever again look me in the face and say one doubtful thing about the power of prayer, I'm telling you that. Because I have prayed for this moment, and I mean I have prayed and prayed …”

“Well, Mama,” I say. “I am so glad I have answered your prayers.”

And I manage to escalate things in the direction of a mutual good-bye, telling them I'll call them later before Mama can remind me that only the Lord answers prayers, not mortal man.

Still in my boxers, I go to my front porch and pick up today's newspaper. On the front page is yet another photo of Donny, one I haven't seen before, one of him and his awful mother, taken at Christmastime with them posed next to one of those artificial all-silver Christmas trees. He's clutching a doll, a G.I. Joe or something, and grinning at the camera.

I throw the paper into the garbage can without even opening it and go back in the house and drain the last of my Tab.

I must have been crazy earlier, thinking this Tab was good, because it tastes like pure-tee poison now. I sit in the captain's chair and cover my eyes with my hands, and stay there like that for a minute or so, because I can't get that photo of Donny holding G.I. Joe out of my head.

I go back out onto the porch and pull the paper out of the garbage can and take it back inside. I lay it on top of the stack of all the other unopened papers—I realize somebody has been bringing them in for me and stacking them up for the last two weeks.

Every last one of them has Donny's picture on the front, with the words “Still Missing” splayed out underneath.

God Almighty …

Where is Dionne Warwick when you need her most?

Noonish

If you've ever gone for a long period of time without taking a shower and putting on clothes, you know that when you finally clean up, it feels like you've been sprung from prison or something. As I bathed, shaved, exfoliated, all that, I was glad to be reminded of what I really look like, to see that I'm not hideous, after all. And even though I don't consider myself movie-star good-looking, though I wish I were, I'll do in a pinch. My hair is about the color of a cured tobacco leaf (though I certainly am not Tobacco Trash), a brown color about one shade lighter than what people so often call mousy. I have an average face, I guess, not a face someone would visualize when they're having idle sex fantasies, per se, but not one that, if they were next to it in bed, would make them scream “Oh, get out, get out of my bed, Cyclops!” My body isn't bad, either; in fact, I'd say it's pretty good; I had been lifting weights every day at Duck Island Health and Racquet before my exile.

Once outside the shack by the sea, I walk the sandy path down to the ocean and stare out over the water, and then close my eyes and let the late-fall salty wind whip me all over. I think how I could just take off my clothes right now and swim out into the ocean and drown, like James Mason did at the end of
A Star Is Born
, because he just couldn't fathom how disappointing his life had become, even though Judy Garland was slavishly in love with him. However, I believe there would really be no point in my doing that, when you think about the fact that James Mason's character at least at one time had a great career, while I, on the other hand, am still waiting for mine to
gel
. (I'm also waiting for someone to be slavishly in love with me, though I don't want to seem greedy.) But I suspect, when all is said and done, that I'm much more the Judy Garland type than the James Mason type, more likely to be the one dressed in evening clothes who tearfully cries into a microphone, “This is Mrs. Norman Maine,” than to be the one who washes up dead on the beach with seaweed in his ears and dressed in an unflattering bathing suit.

Now I'm behind the wheel of my 1989 Datsun, which I call the Dirt Devil, since it's compact-sized and cherry red, and I'm greatly relieved to discover the motor still runs—Daddy probably started it a time or two when they were down here. And that's just the kind of thing he'd be thinking about too, anything with an engine or dependent on a part that you can only get at an automotive store. I don't frequent automotive stores myself; I'm a mall person.

I feel like a new man, and my mind is racing about various things. I careen the Dirt Devil down Beach Drive and turn onto Yaupon Boulevard for the first time in two weeks. I don't know why, but I feel so encouraged to see that someone, probably some lonely, horny teenager, has spray painted the big city limits sign so that it now reads: “Welcome To
Fuck
Island.”

“Oh mah God,” says Tammy Buttry, from her usual outer office/ reception area perch when I walk in the door of Bledsoe Real Estate, and her eyes go all deer-in-the-headlights at the sight of me, though she quickly starts trying to act nonchalant and friendly, saying “
Welll
… hey you, let me give you a
biiig huuug
.” And she does, wrapping her fleshy arms around my neck and nearly choking me to death with the smell of some cheap Sam's Club perfume. But I know she's secretly disappointed to find out that I've actually recovered from my exile, that I didn't have to be carted off in a straitjacket to the Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh after all. And I'm sure she's absolutely
aching
to pick up that phone and call everyone who knows us on the Island to report that I'm up and around and to say
Well, I just can't believe it, I thought T.J. had a complete nervous breakdown, didn't you?
until she gets somebody to agree with her.

“Well hey to you too, Tam But,” I say, which is what I call her, and which I know gets under her splotchy, milky-white skin something fierce, even though I say it with undiluted sweetness.

She smirks a little smirk right back at me, and I can tell she's about to say something that will be mean deep down and sugarcoated on the surface.

“T.J., we were all so worried about you and your … your little time-out,” she says, oozing concern. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes I am, Tam But, and thank you so much for your card,” I say, oozing sincerity right back at her. Poor Tammy; she has never forgiven me for beating her out in auditions for
Nunsense
at the Duck Island Playhouse, in which I broke the gender barrier with my highly acclaimed performance as Sister Mary Amnesia. (Well, I was highly acclaimed by the Wilmington
Star-News
, though maybe it doesn't count so much since the reviewer, Stephen Brickles, has a thing for me and is always trying to get me to go out with him.) One day soon after that, when I was on the phone trying to get a condo deal to go through, I heard Tam But in Rollie Bledsoe's office, all pitiful and crying on his shoulder, saying: “It's not fair that T.J. is a guy and he gets to play Sister Mary Amnesia! It's just not faiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrr, Rollie!!!! WAAAAAAAA!”

“Is that you, Talbert?” Rollie calls out from the inner office. “Come on in, come on in.”

“I'll just go talk to Rollie now, Tam But,” I say, heading for Rollie's knotty-pine door.

Tammy glares at me sweetly and says: “I'm glad you're feeling better,” but I can see her hand is already beginning to creep up to her Rolodex; she just can't wait to start making calls. God, that girl is so small-town. It's pitiful.

“Come in, Talbert,” Rollie says, shutting the door behind us. “I have a paycheck for you.”