The Sleeping and the Dead (16 page)

Neither he nor any of my relatives were hanging around for judgment day today. The cemetery was eerily empty, unlike the roads and fields and towns I had driven through to get here. I have found cemeteries to be the least populated of all places. The dead seem to dislike them as much as the living.

I pulled into my parents' driveway, climbed out of the car and stood in the softly falling snow. Already you could hear the quiet. The tiny flakes of snow touched my flushed, upturned face and melted with an almost audible hiss. I climbed the steps and rang the doorbell like a stranger. Mama opened the door, drew me inside and led me straight to my old bed, where I lay down with a fever of a hundred and two, eyes of blue, and oh what those blue eyes could do.

 

Saturday

 

20

I
LAY IN THE LONELY
narrow single bed of my childhood, beneath a red and black comforter bearing the Arkansas State University logo. My parents had always meant for this room to serve as summer hotel accommodations for some future granddaughter. As with most other aspects of my life, I had disappointed them.

I felt shaky but strangely alert, no longer feverish thanks to my mother's quiet ministrations and a double dollop of NyQuil. But I was sore and my sheets were damp and twisted about my body, as though I had wrestled all night with the angel of the Lord.

Mom opened the door and looked in on me. “You're awake,” she said. She had cooked country ham for breakfast. She didn't often cook a full breakfast anymore. She came back a few minutes later with my clothes washed and folded. My suitcase lay at the foot of the bed. We were nothing alike, she and I. We were strangers to one another, always had been. I had never been able to understand this quiet giant of a woman, who seemed so content within these four walls and a bit of garden. She never could quite wrap her considerable, though underemployed, mental powers around short little Jackie Pastor, who couldn't wait to get out of her house and leap, with eyes and teeth bared, onto the first train out of town. This girl who stripped off her pretty dresses at the age of four for the freedom of panties and a bare naked chest. Who had always run with boys and outrun them, ridden with boys and outridden them, fought with boys and sent them home bloody-nosed and crying, and finally screwed those same boys just as joyfully. All the boys liked me because I gave tremendous head. I never had any girl friends, only accomplices. I would climb out my window after midnight and climb back in before sunup—the female incarnation of Huck Finn. I had never fooled my mother, though she never actually caught me with my pants down.

My father, on the other hand, was willfully clueless, and for that I cherished him. He wanted no part of the daily chore of rearing children. To him children were a source of entertainment, subjects of experiment and study, as though he were Adam and had never been a child himself. I used to ask him after Sunday school,
Did Adam have a belly button?

What's a belly button?
he'd say. I'd show him mine and he'd say,
That's just the scar where the stem broke off. We found you under a persimmon tree and had to dig you up by the roots.
Then he'd send me off to the kitchen to make him a banana sandwich.

You're a banana sandwich,
I'd say.

You're a tom boy.

You're a roly-poly.

You're a codfish.

I sat up in bed and gazed through the window curtains upon a world transformed. Snow lay three inches deep upon the windowsill. The sky seemed to hang just above the trees. My car in the driveway lay under a white blanket, and the driveway, the yard and the road were all one, all lines and boundaries erased. A man in a parka vest and red knit cap slid by on cross-country skis. I had awoken in Pocahontas, Norway.

In the kitchen, Dad was already pulling on his boots over three pairs of socks. He looked like he was preparing to search for the Northwest Passage. Mom was setting plates on the table.

“I am,” Dad said, continuing their conversation. “As soon as I finish my ham.”

“Your father is going to buy whiskey,” Mom said. “In this weather.”

He pulled his chair up to the table and waited for me to sit. The smell of the frying ham was just about to kill me. Mom had also made biscuits and grits, and there were pink grapefruit halves sitting in bowls. As I sat down, she slid a plain egg omelet onto my plate. Dad screwed off the top of the pepper shaker and handed it to me. I dusted my eggs for prints.

“You ruin them,” Mom said as she sat. She was dressed. She never cooked in her housecoat and fuzzy slippers. She bowed her head and waited for me to stop eating.

“Can I go with you?” I asked my father after Mom had thanked God for ham and eggs.

“Of course.”

“You shouldn't go out,” Mom said, sprinkling a spoonful of sugar over her grapefruit.

“I feel fine.”

“You look terrible. You haven't been eating. Do you take calcium?”

“I'm fine, really,” I said.

“If you don't take care of your bones, by the time you're my age you won't be able to straighten your back.”

*   *   *

I met my father at the truck. He had already started the engine and let it warm up. He never drove anywhere without letting the engine warm up. I finished my cigarette and climbed in.

“Since when did you start smoking?” he asked.

“I've been smoking for years. Where are we going?” Pocahontas was in Randolf County, a dry county in the middle of a bunch of dry counties. Paragould, in Greene County, was the closest place to buy liquor, but that was an hour away, minimum. In this snow, and with him driving like an old man, closer to two.

“You told me you quit smoking.”

“I did,” I said. “Lots of times.”

He drove slowly toward the town square rather than the highway, so I knew he wanted to talk.

“Your mother cooked a twenty-pound turkey. I was up until midnight carving it. The fridge is full. You should take some home with you.”

“I will,” I said.

“You couldn't have come home for Thanksgiving?”

I changed the subject. “You should have told me you were out of whiskey. I would have brought you a case from Memphis.”

“Like you have money to buy a case of liquor. How much do you have right now?”

“I have money.”

“You have two dollars.”

I stared out the window, trying not to be pissed, because he was my old man and he wasn't doing or saying anything I didn't already know he would do or say. He said, “I emptied your pockets last night so your mother could wash your clothes. Two bucks and some change and a pack and half of cigarettes.” I rolled down the window. He had the heat cranked up to a hundred and forty. The snow was already starting to melt off the roads. “Your grandmother died of emphysema, you know.”

“I know.”

“Where did you get the money for gas?” He turned south on Marr Street, past the drugstore where I used to skip school and read books without paying for them. Pretending I had money was a waste of time with my old man. He knew I didn't have a checking account and couldn't get a checking account. He didn't have to search my pockets to know I didn't have any money, not after all these years of me calling him up at midnight, begging for fifty bucks just to keep the lights on. Yet still he searched my pockets to see how much I had. And still I lied about having more.

“I'm working,” I said.

“For whom?”

“Lots of people. I did some work for the police yesterday morning. They still owe me for work I did last Monday.”

“Still doing the photography thing, then,” he said with a nod at my new camera.

“It's not a photography
thing
.”

“But wouldn't you rather have a steady paycheck?”

“Doing what?”

“Well, you could teach. You majored in history. The schools around here are dying for good teachers.”

“I'm a photographer,” I said. I couldn't imagine standing in front of a bunch of punk-ass delinquents trying to get them interested in what a bunch of old men did two hundred years ago. If it wasn't about the Civil War or the glory days of the Southwest Conference, Arkansas kids didn't give a rat's ass about history.

“Yeah, but what kind of future is there in what you're doing? I mean, I don't see you saving any money, and you aren't getting any younger.”

“Thanks for noticing, Dad.”

“Do you have a retirement plan at all?”

“Sure. I'm waiting for you to kick the bucket so I can pawn the family jewels.” He didn't laugh. “I've been saving money. Look, I'm buying this camera. It's a Leica.” I said it like he should know what that meant.

“Buying,” he repeated in the fatherly voice he so rarely used, save in moments when he thought I was trying to borrow money.

“I've already paid two thousand on it.”

He turned with a surprised expression, and here was a man who was never surprised. “Two thousand dollars? For that?” But it wasn't the price. He was surprised that I had two grand to spend on anything. “May I see it?”

I pulled the strap over my head and gave it to him at the next stop sign. He turned it over in his hands, mystified by its simplicity. For two grand, you want bells and whistles, you want it to scroll out a sheet of French linen and wipe your ass for you. “What's wrong with your other camera, the one we bought you?”

“This one's better,” I said.

“How?”

“It just is. It's a Leica.”

“What's a Leica? Canon is a good camera.”

“It's the difference between a Mustang and a Maserati.” I was speaking his language now. Cars he could understand. “I need it for my work,” I continued. Lubricating the conversation with truth made lying easier. “I spent all I had on it.”

I couldn't put one over on my old man. Not completely, not when it came to money. “How much do you still need?”

“Only five hundred more.”

“Only.” He looked out the side window so long I thought he was going to crash into something.

“You know, five hundred dollars will last your mother and me two months.”

He turned at the next corner. We slipped and skidded in painfully slow motion down Everett Street. Somehow, he managed to turn onto a side street and glide to a stop against the curb without hitting anything. I pried my fingers from the dash while he opened the door and hopped out.

“Where are you going?”

“Back in a jiff.” He crossed the street and disappeared into an alley between two old brick warehouses that didn't even have the charm of dilapidation. I rolled the window down a crack, lit a cigarette, and pulled out the ashtray. It was virgin steel inside, ashless and buttless, because my father, the sociable lush, had never once touched tobacco. He arrogantly turned up his nose at drunks like myself who did. I was, in fact, violating one of his commandments just by lighting up in his automotive sanctuary. But he would never say anything to me. I had long ago got the bulge on this man and could extract from him any concession I desired simply by dropping one of several names.

I was twelve years old the first time I caught him cheating on my mother. First time of many, so many I sometimes had trouble remembering he was my father and not just another guy—older, fatter, but no different. Yet different nonetheless because I've never known a man, before or since, who got more pussy than my pop. I don't know what it was about him. Maybe he had
it
, whatever
it
is, or maybe
it
was his money. His architecture firm mostly designed for the state government, which meant there was never any shortage of work as long as he made nice with both political parties. He supplied the liquor and women and the government contracts appeared like manna in the morning. So there were always women hanging around his office, women who would do things for money or power or just for the hell of it, mostly smartass country girls trying to be city.

That first time, I had come home from school with an early period to find my old man in the den with my best friend's mom kneeling between his legs, her head bobbing like a Singer sewing machine. She looked up just as my father was having his moment, as they used to say, to see me crouched on the front porch watching through the window in mute horror and (admittedly) Freudian fascination.

I circled the house and crept in through the back door to reach the stairs without having to confront them, unaware that they had already beat a hasty retreat through the front door. That night, my father entered my bedroom and asked me what I thought I had seen. I told him I was fairly certain of what I had seen, at which point he got down on his knees and tearfully begged me to not to tell my mother, promising me anything.

What a flush of power that was. The whole world opened like a magnolia blossom. He was lucky I was only twelve. Had I been sixteen, there was nothing I wouldn't have extorted from him—money, cars, an apartment of my own. He was only saved by the limits of my pre-teen imagination. That, and it sickened me to see him grovel. At that moment, all I really wanted was my daddy back and to be his little girl again. That never happened, of course.

What is seen cannot be unseen, innocence lost is lost forever, but in that there is no crime except, perhaps, against time. Eventually we became accomplices, Dad and I. He covered for me when I skipped school and I covered for him when I caught him with a woman. Any time he tried to reassert his parental authority over me, all I needed was to say I had seen Tammy Albright at the post office or the grocery store and he would smile and nod like the genial fellow thief he had become. Eventually I forgave him, as we must eventually forgive everyone, even ourselves. Wisdom just arrived a little earlier for me, as did most of the disappointments in my life.