Tomato Red (18 page)

“Is it time for this?” she asked.

“Seems like.”

“Everything’s not about sex.”

“A good bit is.”

A sound of claws scraping shingles fell from the roof. The claws sounded like an upset tiny hailstorm zinging across the shingles, then circling back in a frenzy. Probably this noise was of a cat trying to kick a fox squirrel’s butt up there. The tiny hailstorm leaped from the roof to the shade tree and made the limbs click together.

Jamalee twisted her shoulders about, her body bumping me back, trying to clear her some elbow room. I pulled away from her a tad and she twisted over onto her back. The purple robe bunched around her waist like a life preserver.

“Hot,” she said. “Awful hot.”

Her tomato head came up as she sat up and she undid the robe, yanked it loose, and pitched it to the floor. Her tomato flopped to the pillow again and, God, the entire dictionary of feelings came into play inside me in various parts. I’m a person who digs good smells and she had herself one. Her eyes were open about halfway. She laid there an itty-bitty beautiful small person with thick untended pubic hair that was brown.

I let my bath-towel skirt fall.

She spun into a spoon again and I followed her. Bones in her ribs and shoulders came through her flesh clear and easy to trace. To me she was special and all, but she didn’t carry a chest rack like her mom did, or have that real lush type of behind, but still she was special and all, I think, in a different lean bony way.

I slid my hand past the crack in her ass, from the rear, there, and got a hold on her snatch with a couple of fingers and rubbed. I added in several neck kisses and groans of gratitude and wonder. My fingers rubbed as on a lucky coin or something, a rabbit’s foot or silver bullet.

“Be good to me,” she said. “Or bad.”

I worked a finger in her. It wasn’t like dipping into a spring or anything. She wasn’t juiced up with desire exactly. I pulled my hand back and spit on my finger and sent it in again, which went better, slightly. She had a few sounds in her throat that I guess were meant to encourage me but didn’t.

“Look,” I said, “we don’t
have
to do this.”

“Hey, Sammy, listen—I’m a human, too, myself. I don’t want to be alone, you know?”

Her comment just then planted the happy hopeful notions in my head that would later come to haunt and run me
ragged. They were planted with plenty of bullshit to grow on and certainly did.

“That thought has appeared in my mind also.”

“So, Tarzan, what gives?”

Well, it got to be skin on skin and she put a rubber on me with an awkward grip and I climbed on and the thing got going. She made some grunts I couldn’t decipher. She laid still as though I might miss the target if she wiggled or thrashed or even pumped along at a slow pace. Her eyes were rolling up like an accident victim. The kind you see laying alongside the highway on a stretcher, eyes wobbling, dealing with their fresh concussions.

“Oh, baby,” she said.

“What?”

“Oh, baby, baby.”

When it happened, nothin’ much happened. The bare minimum of joy got harvested. Uh, uh, uh, then I squirted; she made a noise and hopped away and went to the john. Pretty soon I heard dishes rattle in the kitchen.

I helped myself to another of Bev’s cool menthol cigarettes. I walked to the kitchen, toward the rattling dishes. Jamalee was inside one of her tents, a green tent. I got close and tried to hug her from the back and she came stiff to attention until I stepped away.

This mood was not the mood you hope for after sweaty business has gone on. It was as if from lifelong spite toward her mother she’d made a pledge to never enjoy sex much. I’d say her mom kind of got the better end of that stick.

Jamalee popped the fridge open. I looked out the screen door and saw it was full dark with fireflies out there; then I saw the candles flickering across the way on a card table in Bev’s backyard. I believed I could smell fried chicken.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

BEV SAT BESIDE the card table of food under the tree behind the flickering candles and spoke: “Did you all get yourselves washed real
good
and
cool
? I surely
do
hope you did. Because it has just been skillet-hot out here
waitin’
on you. You all do
look
like maybe the heat
has
been at you, though. Goodness knows it’s been at
me
pretty rough. Don’t you know heat this high makes my temples
throb
, then
pound
. Throb and pound. Throb and pound. You do look a touch flushed, hon. Both of you do.

“I hope the two of you-all won’t have to feel all that
throbbin’
and
poundin’
like me. I’d hate to see that—a mother always hopes her children will have it better than she.

“Now, as to hunger, for
food
, you all just help yourselves to whatever’s left of the feast that the flies didn’t shit on too much already. I’ve been waitin’ a good long while, throbbin’ and poundin’, and there’s been flies and bugs about aplenty.

“Now, ol’ Biscuit has ate extra good in the past hour. Beer, Sammy?”

“Damn straight. Thanks.”

The beer rested in a bucket that had earlier been full of ice but now was slightly cool water. The fact that Bev had brung beer, too, shows you so clear where her heart was at. I didn’t feel real tall in Bev’s eyes at that instant, but I had a rugged thirst on.

For a while me and Jamalee
did
eat. Bev smoked smoke after smoke and tossed back glasses of wine. We all said hallelujah when a breeze shuffled by. Only drumsticks and wings were left. The abandoned cats started circling. The file folder was on the table, I noted, underneath the potato salad dish.

Jamalee didn’t say a word for quite a spell, only chewed and swallowed, staring at Bev.

Then came a point when she flung her attitude back at Bev: “Mom, does anal sex hurt?”

“No more than it should, hon.”

“Mom, did you used to get more money back in the days when you used to swallow?”

“Oh, goodness gracious, yes, hon. More of
every
good thing—most of which went to you and your brother.”

A mouthful of beer right then somehow squirted up my nose and made me spew and hack for breath.

“Mom, did I ever tell you how much I appreciated all the sacrifices you made for your kids?”

“Why, no. No, you never have.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear that.”

“Oh, I agree, hon. I’d rather you
don’t
lie to me.”

I said, “Those cats sure are throaty at night.”

“Huh. See, so often,
Mom
, I’ve wished you
would
have lied to me.”

“Well, when you get to be an
a
-dult, baby Jam, maybe I’ll be able to explain things to you in words you understand.”

“I think I understand the words that apply to you,
Mom
.”

“You’ve set quite a spread here, Bev.”

“I’ll bet my sweet left titty that you
don’t
, hon. Not nearly.”

“Funny thing, I’d say the potato salad tasted best.”

Anyhow, a certain kind of quiet set in there for a short time that was mostly all tension with smoldering edges and loved ones having thoughts they’d like to scream at each other but didn’t.

 

I FELT A huge togetherness with him seeing him dead in the pictures. The camera didn’t give his body much of a break—it caught the horrid aspects and the homely smallness of it all. The pictures were dealt out the way solitaire is dealt out
along the carpet beneath Bev’s brightest lamp, and they told a story that made you want to slam your hands over your ears and run with your eyes squeezed shut. Jason laid there dead in each and was seen from several angles. He laid there sogged from pond scum, his hands hovering stiff above ground, the fingers spread, two fishhooks shining snagged in the web between thumb and forefinger. His hands seemed in death to be attempting a little gesture, barely started toward a wave, maybe, or that palms-up move that means stop! Stop! Stop!

“No,” Jamalee said. “Huh-uh. I can’t see more of that. I can’t.”

There were sniffles and such from Bev’s green chair.

“Broken arm,” she said. “Broken
arm
. He didn’t break his arm in that pond the way they say.”

The dog stood at the door, whining to come in.

“If he died over golf . . .”

Wires from different worlds were crossing in my head and I got static as a result. Incomplete murky ideas garbled to me.

“Well,” Jamalee said, “there’s also the fellas you snitched on in days gone by.”

“Don’t say that. Shut up about that.”

“Plus,” I said, “your run-of-the-mill queer stompers. This town has them like any other.”

“But if he died over golf . . .”

I heard myself say, “Anybody at that club knows about any rough stuff it’s goin to be that tush hog that sneak-punched me. That puts me in the right mind to do the thing that needs doin’. I believe I’m goin’ to drop in kind of sudden on that motherfucker. I’m goin’ to ask him
direct
questions, if the answers test out wrong I’ll shoot that motherfucker. I’ll hurt him so bad to where his
grandchildren
fall over in heaps. I’ll make God hisself ask me to go a li’l easy, please. And I’ll disregard God’s please, too, most likely.”

The only sound for a minute came from Biscuit, still whining. The photos on the floor shined, reflecting the lamp-light like a spread of mirrors you didn’t want to look in.

Then Jamalee says, “Oh, hell, yes. I’d say that’s a plan. Plan enough, Tarzan.”

YOU KNOW IT, too, how so many times when you enact something that turns
extra
big-deal wrong it wasn’t what you set out to do at all, or even had in your mind or the back of it. Sometimes you just paused to say, Hey, man, how you been doin’? or maybe you’d say, Just pay me when you get it, or, Do you love him? There was no misdeed in the forefront of your intentions, just skanky chance and nasty chemistry and the wrong words conspiring at you, then
click-click, bang-bang
, and what you have done wasn’t what you’d had in mind to do that day but it sure enough got up in your face and happened.

Oh, what a shame.

Mercy, mercy.

At those times you puke and guess God is merely a meddling sort of pissant warden with a series of teachy and insulting events planned that will make or break you, bring you in meek to be loved like a dumb soft lamb, or throw you away for good to continue life unloved on the planet as a loner mutt who’d rather bite a lamb in the ass than lay beside one.

That coin when it comes to you only has the one side and you wake up every dang day livin’ on it.

That morning I woke smack-dab there again.

Jamalee had a mood on that influenced me from the kitchen. Her stomped footsteps were complaints meant to stir me from bed. The dishes rattled like questions she wanted to ask of me in a sort of brittle tone, I think.

I figured nerves had rubbed raw in her overnight, as this was the day we’d said we’d wave Rod’s pistol at a select citizen or two and provoke some breathy answers. I got dressed, then reached high in the closet, past the stacks of old shoe-boxes and such, and pulled down the pistol. I checked the clip and the chamber, then tucked it into my belt line and wore it with the butt sticking up.

Straightaway I could feel that I walked different.

The sun slammed bright light and tough morning heat into the kitchen. The heat helped release odors. Jamalee wore black pants pegged at the ankles and clingy in general, with shower sandals and a red T-shirt that left her belly out to be seen. She leaned against the fridge and was drinking a glass of root beer without ice.

“No coffee again?” I said.

“No. There’s root beer, it’s got caffeine.”

“I can’t take it warm like that.”

“
Tsk, tsk. Somebody
didn’t refill the ice tray.”

The first smoke of the day was lit.

“It might not’ve been
me
that didn’t.”

“Huh-uh. That doesn’t work, Sammy. If it wasn’t
me
, which it wasn’t, it
had
to be
you
, which it was.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I see the math there. Okay, want to whip me for it? Want me to bare my butt so you can whack on it?”

“No, huh-uh. That’s actually a part of you I’ve decided I don’t care to ever witness anymore. We’ll forget that one hour of that one day ever happened. Please? That’s what I’d prefer, at least.”

“Geez. Was it, was it, what? Awful? Scary?”

“Let’s not review yesterday’s lesson, Sammy.”

“I said we didn’t
have
to, you know. I
said
that.”

A train was coming too close to be talked over, and we
stood there each stuck in our pose, staring, while the tracks screamed and the shiny wheels kept crushing onward. The shack vibrated and hummed like a cheap gadget that had just been plugged in and was already defective.

She said, “I never even truly thought about doing things by myself before. Before Jason got killed. Before then I never had, but I sort of have now.”

“You ain’t alone, Jam.”

“I’m not?”

“I’m right here.”

“Aw—you’re with Bev. Because of the sex business.”

“We can do without that. We can be together the way a certain style of brother and sister are. Or old folks.
We
don’t
need
the sex.”

“But you
men
, you’ve
got
to have your sex stuff.
Got
to have it.”

“So? Your mom, Jam, she really knows how to do, believe you me.”

“I don’t care to feature that picture in my head, Sammy darling. I don’t care for that
at all
.”

I ran tap water over the cigarette stub, then dropped it into a bean can that stood on the stove. There came a cat yell right then, and a second later Biscuit hustled to the screen door, wanting in fairly bad. I bounced the door open with a boot toe and held it for the sad-sack mutt.