Part 15 (1/2)
Every conversation I had with Lloyd seemed like two unconnected conversations spliced together. ”What were you doing in Dad's creel?”
He looked up from his hands. ”You threw it at me, remember? You said take what money I needed and you sprinted off to the lounge.”
”I don't think I sprinted.”
Marcella turned to me with tears tracking down her cheeks. ”You sprinted. We all agreed that was the word.”
Hugo Sr. let the bag drop. He said, ”If you leave, I will follow to the end of the Earth. My baby shall never cry without his father hearing and coming to his aid.”
Andrew crawled under the truck with another matchstick. His voice came from behind the inside dual. ”I saw you pork Mrs. Gilliam.”
My body speaks its needs in one-word sentences. ”Shower,” it says. ”Whiskey.” ”Sleep.” Right then it said ”Coffee.” Whenever I need something I need it right now and I need it real bad.
I sat in the Golden Sandstorm Cafe in a window booth, listening to ”Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” on the dishroom radio. Some joker leaves prison and the whole darn bus cheers when his girlfriend takes him back. Had to rank with ”Cotton Eye Joe” as the worst songs in world history. I'm not a sn.o.b or anything, but bad taste offends me.
Here's what I thought about over coffee as I looked out the window at trucks kicking up dust on U.S. 287: I thought about the ever-closing gap between the time I first feel the urge for something and the absolute last moment I can go without it without screaming. My body needs were becoming n.a.z.is of immediate gratification.
Except in the one area where gratification used to count most. It'd been many months, maybe even years, since my body said ”s.e.x.” Had I lost the need, let it slip into wistful-stuff-from-my-youth, or had it merely gone into hibernation, someday to awaken with a hungry roar to devour whatever object with a p.e.n.i.s happened to be standing nearby?
Sometimes I hoped it was lost forever, other times I hoped to roar again. More starve-or-binge mentality. For someone who didn't want s.e.x I sure thought about it a lot.
”Stand by for news!”
All right. I hadn't known what time it was or what station carried Paul's show or anything, and here he was. My lucky day. Of course, Amarillo might be the one town with Paul on every station, but you take your omens of an upswing wherever you find them.
Paul's voice, or G.o.d's, or Dad's, depending on your suspension of disbelief, came echoing across America's heartland with the Truth. All the Truth, nothing but the Truth, so help us G.o.d.
I wasn't sure, didn't even care, about Truth's content-Paul was against hijacking, obscenity in schools in Illinois, and the nation of Argentina, for the workingman and Kerr canning jars, and split on Watergate. I think he took the everybody-does-it-so-get-off-Nixon's-back stance. Or maybe he condemned the stance, the dish machine made it hard to follow. Paul had a funny line about Chuck Colson's grandmother.
Content didn't matter. What mattered was one person in the whole universe who was sure of something. Paul Harvey gave my life consistency. Like showers and Yukon Jack, he was there when all else broke up and floated away. When Paul read the daily b.u.mper snicker-”Have Grandchild, Will Baby-sit”-I almost wanted to cry. Cliff and Marjene Henderson were celebrating seventy-five years of wedded bliss. Take that, Dothan Talbot. A street woman in Little Rock had searched thirty years for the son she gave up as a baby, then was arrested for vagrancy and when she went up before the judge, glory be, there he was. The woman is now living comfortably in the judge's guest room, cared for by her doting baby boy.
Only in America. How many mothers gave up their sons before one of them made it as a story on Paul Harvey News?
Marcella did her timid entry thing with Hugo Jr. through the screen door. After Paul, and the reunited family story, I actually didn't mind her joining me. When Marcella ordered breakfast, I said, ”I'll take whatever she's having.”
What she was having was skimmed milk, Texas toast, and hash browns. Texas toast is when you take a loaf of white bread and drop it in the French fryer.
”Shane tells me your marriage failed also,” Marcella said. Her bun leaked strands of black hair across her high cheekbones, and she hadn't fixed her face after the tear session. Hugo Jr. drooled on her shoulder on this smock thing that covered her chain-store blouse. Gave her a Grapes of Wrath look.
”Yes, my marriage failed also.”
”Did your husband commit adultery?”
”Dothan nailed anything that didn't fight back.”
Her hands reminded me of a lawn full of gra.s.shoppers in late summer. On first glance you think Peaceful lawn, but give it a second look and you realize peaceful is actually chaos.
Marcella's face was void of a sense of humor. ”Hugo Sr. is adulterous.”
”Throw his a.s.s into the street.”
We both paused over our fried bread to picture Marcella throwing anybody's a.s.s anywhere. She adjusted the collar of her smock. ”Is that how you treated your husband when he was”-pause-”with another?”
I thought about Dothan and Sugar and whose a.s.s wound up in the street. ”That's what I would do, not what I did. What I did was drink whiskey until I didn't care anymore.”
She stared into her milk the way I did coffee or alcohol. I don't see how you can fathom deep stuff in milk because the surface doesn't let in light.
”I'm tempted to drink whiskey, I really am.” Her eyes lifted to mine. ”Only I don't think I could ever drink enough not to care that Hugo was intimate with Annette Gilliam. I'll never be able to look at him again without seeing her kissing his lips. They even did it in the Oldsmobile once. Can you imagine doing it in a car-like an animal.”
The tendency was to belittle-”What animal does it in a car, Marcella?”-but I squashed that tendency. The woman left her husband because he nailed on the side. Timid flower or not, she had more courage than I did.
”I can't sleep,” she said. ”Whenever I close my eyes I see them in the public schools taking memory photos of the little children, then they go out in the parking lot and she touches him in the Oldsmobile, and he says, 'I love you, Annette Gilliam.' How could he do that, then come home and kiss our babies and touch me with the same hands that touched her?”
I gave my explanation. ”Men are sc.u.m.”
Marcella's eyes were all need. ”My life is a nightmare.”
I'm no good at eye contact with women. I always think they can see what I'm hiding. I don't know what I'm hiding, I never looked at it myself, but it's dirty and weak and I can hide it from men but not from women.
I pulled away from her eyes to look out the window at Andrew, who seemed to be peeing into a Cadillac's gas tank. ”When I came back to GroVont from college, I decided I'd been hurt as much as I could stand. I married Dothan because I thought nothing he did would ever hurt me.”
”If he can't hurt you, you don't love him.”
”That's the point, Marcella.”
She stared at me. I know her background. She was raised to believe marriage for any reason other than love, even if the reason is to avoid pain, is the worst sin a woman can commit.
”Was it true?” she asked. ”Has he ever hurt you?”
Andrew finished peeing and began stuffing gravel into the gas tank. I could see Hugo Sr. sitting in his Oldsmobile in front of the Zippy Mart next door. He was drinking something from a thermos. I thought about Dothan and the Wyoming Family Violence Protection Act that took my baby and gave it to him.
”No,” I said. ”He hasn't found a way to hurt me.”
”There's Shane,” I said. The wheelchair came around the west corner of the fake adobe motel. Far as I could tell, nothing existed beyond that corner but black dirt.
Marcella slid from the booth and stood up with Hugo Jr. on her hip. ”I hope he didn't spend the night outdoors. My brother is p.r.o.ne to pneumonia and death.” Shane didn't look p.r.o.ne to death. He was playing his harmonica and bobbing his head as a little girl in a costume pushed the chair.
”The doctors told him to get rest and never catch a cold.”
”Why should Shane be more p.r.o.ne to pneumonia than you or me?” I asked.