“All right, wise guy. All right.”
“Maybe you could get a portable one. Do they make portable ones? You could plug it into the cigarette lighter or somewhere—”
“Knock it off, Joll.” Luke’s tired voice had an edge around it.
“—and that would save flopping their butts on that cold table. You could make a hell of a lotta money. You really could.” Jolly stopped to laugh. “I’ll be your manager. Can I be your manager, Luke?”
“Jolly, goddamit, shut up!”
“We could have little cards printed up. Business cards. What’ll we say on ’em, Luke? ‘Bring your troubles to us: Dead or alive we fix them up.’ How’s that? Or how about, ‘Expert Semen Sweeping: After Hours Service, No Extra Charge for Home Calls.’
“Jolly. I’m warning you.” Luke slowed the car.
“—‘Tubes Cleaned While You Wait.’ At five bucks a throw, plus transportation costs, of course, we could really clean up in this friggin’ town. We could give out the cards at school—sort of like another library card—and maybe we could sneak into Doogle’s and poke holes in all the prophylactics and then leave one of the little cards in the package.” His words rose in spasms of sound.
Luke drove the car in Freddy’s parking lot and swung it to the far side, away from the lights. He pulled the hand brake deliberately and turned off the key. For a moment he rested his forehead on his hands that gripped the wheel, shutting out the sounds of Jolly’s hysteria. Then he walked into the restaurant. “Two hamburgers and two coffees. To go,” he told the waitress.
THE car had been parked across the street and a little down from the house more than an hour ago, in a place past the light where the mulberry branches arched over the sidewalk and farther, ten feet over the street. The car was some dark color, black or maybe maroon, but it would have been impossible to say which, parked that way in the black shade of the leaves.
Jamie left the car almost as soon as it slipped into the shade. He stood beside it a time while nothing showed but the repeated sudden bright-orange pin of light that glowed, then arched down and dimmed. Finally, the pin of light skittered five or six feet over the pavement, shooting tiny, frustrated fractures of orange that died instantly. He crossed the street diagonally into the lamplight and then into the dark again as he turned up the overgrown path between the two pines. He stood there with his hands jammed into the front pockets of his tight, black pants and faced the house in the way a man watches something because it’s there—to hold his eyes—while his mind is somewhere else. He did not move for a long time except to cup the light of a match to his face twice or three times, and to shift his weight from one foot to the other as quietly as a hunter standing in oak cover waiting at dawn for a deer to cross. When the beams from the approaching car first caught the lilac bushes, Jamie turned his head toward them and watched the car come fast up the street, its lights flicking quick dapples over his pale face.
Jolly stood for a moment to watch Luke squeal the big car out into the street before he turned up the path. He saw the figure beside the pine an instant before it spoke.
“Jolly,” the voice said, almost too quietly to hear.
Jolly recognized that voice and knew he recognized it before he jumped, but he could not stop his heart from thumping once, any more than he could stop the small yelp.
“Jamie!”
Jamie laughed, low and throaty. “Hi, Jolly.” He stayed where he was, there in the shadow of the pine and lilac.
“Jeez, Jamie. What’re you doing here? Jeez.” Jolly stepped across the path near the tree. “It’s about time. Where the hell have you been all this time? Jamie, why—”
Jamie laughed, and his hand entered the dim light to touch Jolly’s shoulder and then the back of his neck. “You still ask questions. I could ask you what the hell you’re doing coming home now, at this time of night.”
“It’s not so late,” Jolly grinned. His hands went first to his front pockets, then settled in the back ones. “You used to be as late. Or maybe not come in—”
“OK,” Jamie said. “OK. Here, sit down.” He squatted on his heels. Jolly sat beside him, on a rock. He heard Jamie rustling a cigarette package. “You smoke?”
“Some. Yeh, I smoke some. Not too much, but Mom—”
“Look, I don’t care. You got any? I’m out.”
Jolly felt in his own shirt pocket. “Yeh, sure, Jamie. I have some.” The pack was jammed in his pocket. He yanked at it. “Just a minute,” he said. “I’ve got some right here.” His fingers plucked at the pocket. “Goddam things are stuck.”
“Take it easy,” Jamie said. “Here.” He reached his hand into Jolly’s pocket where all the confusion was just as surely as if he could see in the dark and took out the pack. “You want one?”
He had thought he was going to say yes. “No,” he said.
“Here.”
“No. You keep them.”
“I got more in the car.” Jamie touched Jolly’s arm with the cigarette package.
“You keep them, Jamie,” he said. And then he laughed, “I’ll just have to hide them when I get in.” He stopped talking when he felt Jamie’s hand replace the pack in his shirt pocket.
When the brief, cupped light flared, Jolly watched it outline the front part of his brother’s face in profile. With his cheeks sucked in to draw the smoke and his eyes squinted with the black, heavy eyebrows pulled deep, he could have been a stranger, except for something there in his face that was familiar, but that seemed to belong to someone else.
They sat that way together a long time, neither speaking, while Jamie automatically smoked the cigarette and Jolly concentrated on keeping his hands and feet still by folding his arms and leaning them forward on his knees. Somewhere behind them in the dry leaves a cricket took up his squalid chanting again and was answered by a dimmer voice up the path nearer the house. It was funny how people you knew well smelled the same, even after two years and after things change so much. Jamie smelled as he had forever. A little damp and leatherish, only now the leather smell would be from automobile upholstery. And the same hair oil that was some too sweet and was supposed to keep Jamie’s black curls from falling out but didn’t. The tobacco smell was right, too, only milder, as old as the leather. Jolly thought of the times, back in the country, when he carefully filched their father’s cigarettes or gathered butts from along the roadside to save for Jamie who would smoke anything, including grapevine and Bull Durham.
“You going in to see Mom? She’ll be awake.”
“No. Not tonight.” Jamie ground the cigarette out in the dirt beside his boot.
“Where’ve you been, Jamie. What’ve you been doing since last time?”
Jamie laughed. He did not say anything, not for a while, but the short, brittle sound stilled Jolly’s question. “Oh, I’ve been here and there, Joll. Mostly in hell,” he added.
“What?”
“Skip it.”
“Jamie, tell me about—well, you know. You must’ve gotten a lot of girls and all.” He laughed. “With that pecker you’ve got, you—”
“Don’t talk like that. What do you think you are? And you’re not my goddam confessor. So shut up.” He reached out his hand to Jolly’s shoulder. “Aw, sit down and wait a minute.”
Yes, he guessed he could tell the kid a couple of tales. He could tell him one tale, all right. One that would make him curl up his hind-end and run. The one that made him sick to his stomach still to think about. And Mandy. The kid had probably eyed that himself. He’d seen the high-school boys twitch and go blind-eyed dumb when she took their orders at Freddy’s. Well, that wasn’t worked out, either. But he had had to admit, the kid—the baby—was funnier than hell. And she was all right, too. After that first night he had been able to stay, and with the lights off he had been able to forget about the little boy. She really was all right. At least she didn’t bitch about anything, and she sure didn’t have it so good. If anybody could appreciate that fact, he was the one. A big pecker, yeah. And the big peckers shall inherit the earth and fill it with fools and nightmares.
“You want to talk, Jolly, go on. I don’t have anything to say. You never did tell me where you’ve been so late.”
Jolly told him. He told him more than he meant to, about Di Carson and the dance and about Bill Kemp. He didn’t say anything about what Luke and Babe Wooten had done. He felt Jamie’s eyes on him, although he couldn’t see him. He talked a long time until he had said it all, nearly. When his voice ran down to nothing, Jamie reached over to his pocket and fished out another cigarette and lit it before he said anything.
“You swear a lot,” Jamie said. The orange light showed for a moment his fingers and the lower part of his face. “Why’d you take that kind of girl?”
Jolly scraped a place in the dirt and needles with his heel. “I thought you’d get the idea,” he said.
“I did,” Jamie said. “You sixteen now, Joll?”
“Yeh,” Jolly answered morosely, as if sixteen were the year of the plague. “How old were you, Jamie?”
“When?”
“You know when, goddamit, Jamie.”
Jamie laughed, louder than before, but still too quietly to be heard far. Then he was silent again. “I don’t know. Younger than you, I guess. But what difference does it make.”
“What difference? It makes a whole hell of a lot of difference. To me.”
“That’s the point,” Jamie said.
“What?”
“The difference.” Jamie’s hand lay on Jolly’s knee, there in the dark by the pine. “You’re not me, Jolly.”
“I know that.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t know that at all. You think just because—Well, forget it. I can’t help you any more than I can help me. That’s all.”
“Don’t go, Jamie.”
“I got to.”
Jolly stood. “No, you don’t, Jamie. Can’t we talk some more? I want—”
“I’ll be around. Not any more, now.” Jamie moved in the shadow, but silently. “And, Jolly?”
“Yeh? Hey!”
“Hold still. Listen. You don’t know—you’re better. You’re better.”
A moving branch tipped the pale light over Jolly’s face for an instant, but he could still not see the other face. He only felt the strong arms on his own. “What do you mean? I guess I don’t know what anybody means.”
“Just shut up and listen. You know it killed our old man, don’t you?” Jamie watched as the light tipped again. “No.”
“What, Jamie?”
Jamie laughed, low, mirthlessly. “No, you wouldn’t know. Forget that, Jolly. And forget what you’re trying to do. Just let it go.”
“Wait. Wait a minute, Jamie. Tell me, Jamie. Tell me what—”
“Hush,” he whispered. Jolly felt his fingers, light yet strong and thin, cover his mouth. “Hush. I’m going to tell you sometime, Jolly, some things I haven’t even said to myself. Wait. Not now. Not now. You listening?”
Jolly nodded, but he couldn’t have said anything if he had wanted to, with those fingers growing tighter against his mouth. He could feel Jamie close to him, so close he could hear him breathe. So close that even in the shadow of the pine and lilac he could see Jamie’s face dimly emerge, and he wondered at its whiteness.
“You were right to let that one go. Even if you could have stopped her, you were right to let that one go. That’s no good. Sure, I know it’s great to think about it, and it’s great to do it. But it’s no good this way. You’ve got a hard on every night when you go to bed and every morning when you wake up and half a dozen times in between. And I know, it won’t wear out. Dammit, Jolly, you’re only a kid!” Jamie’s voice was close and fierce. “You’re only a kid,” he said. “And that’s not what matters at all. What’s on your mind—that’s not what matters.” He felt Jolly’s body flinch. He relaxed his hold and stepped back in the deeper shadow by the tree. “Sorry,” he said and was quiet.
Again he began. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you.”
“No, I don’t,” Jolly said. “What do you expect me to do? Tie a red ribbon around it and save it for my old age?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass all your life.”
“You sound like you’re talking about love, for chrissake. I’m not talking about that. I don’t even believe in it, anyway.”
“Well, you got a lot to learn. More than I figured. And I guess I’m not the one to teach it to you. I’m going now,” he said.
Jolly watched him pass through the light from the street lamp and into the dark again beneath the overhanging mulberry branches.
LATER the same morning, despite the fact that sleep had not come to him until after the pine outside his bedroom had greened in the dawn, Jolly walked to church with his mother. He did it more to dissuade her temper than for any latent religious consciousness. And she had enjoyed very little more sleep than he. lying awake until his footsteps sounded on the path, until she had heard the caution of the back door, and felt, rather than saw, the bare light spring against the stove and the table and the ancient green washer. She heard her younger boy undress clumsily in the dark living room and listened to the long-familiar snap of the board between the kitchen and the bathroom. She heard the toilet flush, water running in the sink, the snap of the board again.
“Lord have mercy,” she prayed, and then she slept the three hours until it would be time to be up stirring around.
She had not spoken more than was necessary to disunite Jolly from his bed and inform him his breakfast was ready. Mattawilde Osment had never been one to have it out with her children, or anybody else, except perhaps the greengrocer when he tried to foist inferior tomatoes or mustard greens on her. Her tight-lipped anger was doubtless inbred as part of the formula for rearing proper Southern girls in a family abundant in everything—including correct ante-bellum genealogy—except money.
Or it may have developed from twenty-five years of following in her husband’s tracks over most of the United States and a good portion of Canada, seeing him mostly on station platforms, until he settled for the last time in Skull Valley. Their years together in the Southwest were peaceful ones; so much so in fact, that Mattawilde gave birth to her third child at the age of forty-eight and was pretty put out about it—not that she didn’t want the child, but because both she and the doctor in Cortez thought it was a tumor for the first five months, which put her rather far behind with her layette.
She had been the only one of her family to travel farther than Knoxville, with the exception of the youngest boy, Robert, who turned renegade and went up North to preach for the Methodists.
She limped from the refrigerator to the stove, giving the brunt of her anger to a black iron skillet she had had longer than she had Jolly. The limp was forty-six years old. She acquired it at the age of seventeen when in a black-eyed fury she had pitted her matched mules against the team of a particularly contemptible young man from Nashville with whom she was seasonally in love. Her buggy, although not far in the rear at the time, overturned, and the off-mule kicked the bone in her leg to smithereens. The city fellow kept going.
Beside his plate Jolly found two items that belied his mother’s anger, if nothing else did. A tall glass of tomato juice. That would be because she believed two beers made you drunk, and she had read somewhere that tomato juice was the only antidote. A nearly empty pack of Lucky Strikes. That was to show Jolly he had forgotten to hide them early this morning, and that she was on to his tricks. Jolly stuffed the package into his bathrobe pocket and picked up the glass of juice.
“Here’s your eggs.” She slid three fried eggs onto his plate and a half-dozen slices of bacon. “Hustle up. They’s hot cakes in a minute.”
“Aw, Mom. You know I hate big breakfasts.” Jolly poked the center of an egg and watched the yolk spread under the bacon.
“Hum.” That was her method of punishment—big breakfasts. It would serve him right, staying out all the live-long night, galavanting heaven knows where. “Serves you right,” she said, pouring batter into the skillet.
Nothing more was said by either over breakfast. Later they emerged dressed for church, she from the bedroom, he from the bathroom, and met in the living room. He scowled at the morning comics and she at the clock until it read twenty of eleven, precisely. She stood from her rocker, ran a pin through her hat at a jaunty angle, picked up her Bible and purse and said, “It is time.”
The walk to the Morningside Baptist Church helped alleviate her feelings, as Jolly was sure it would. She was secretly proud to show her tall son to the Sunday morning world, and besides, the walk gave her a chance to inspect the progress of everybody’s iris and lilac. She had theorized for years, when neighbors stopped to comment on her own flowers, that “A body couldn’t grow a hill a beans in this dirt. All’s I do is just scratch around, just scratch around,” although when her brothers and sisters urged her return to Tennessee she reckoned she had too much dust and cactus in her hide to ever appreciate jasmine or magnolias again.
At the doors of the church the ladies gathered to one side, ostensibly to get a better view of, and greet, any newcomers. The men gathered dourly a little distance away, talking about whatever noncontroversial topics there are left to discuss within the shadow of a Baptist Church. The young people, those who couldn’t escape being neither fish nor fowl, entered the church so that they could get the choice seats as far back as possible under the balcony where it was unlikely anyone had ever heard a word spoken in a normal voice from the pulpit.
“Mother, let’s go on in,” said Jolly, offering her his arm.
“Just a minute, Jolly-Bo. I want to speak to Miz Edhols.” She drew Jolly with her.
“Hello, Mattawilde. Jolly. My, he’s still growin’ like a weed.” Jolly winced. “I was sayin’ to my Billy this mornin’—you know my Billy just
admires
Jolly. Thinks the world an’ all of him. He truly does.”
Mama eyed Jolly significantly for a second.
“Wants to sing like him, and everything. Course, my Billy’s goin’ in the ministry. He’s already made up his mind and seems there ain’t nothin’ me nor Homer can do about it—not that we’d be wantin’ to, you understand. He does have a fine voice, don’t he?”
“Who?” asked Mama, her lips thin.
“Why, Billy! A course he’s not as old as your Jolly, but when he
is—”
She winked at Jolly, and he fluttered the makings of a smile, hoping she hadn’t expected him to wink back. “—he’ll be somethin’ to behold. Well, you gotta fine Christian boy, too, Mattawilde. Lord bless us.”
You old bat, thought Jolly. You and your snot-nosed Billy. I wish he could have been along last night. He might have learned something—enough to curl
your
ears.
“Thank you, Mrs. Edhols. You coming, Mother?”
“You run along. I’ll be there directly,” she said, turning to greet skinny Mrs. Fries.
Jolly had to shake no less than fourteen hands on his way up the stairs to the inside doors. These were the elected Greeters and Ushers, both active and emeritus, the former group ladies, the latter, men. At the very top of the stairs he extracted his hand from a lady’s cotton grip and grasped a man’s.
“Good morning, Jolly.”
Jolly looked in the intense eyes of the preacher, a dark young man of less than thirty who had been in his present church only a year. “Just like a grand reception line, isn’t it,” he smiled.
“Yeh,” Jolly laughed. “I feel like Queen Elizabeth, or something. Ah—how are you, Mr. Cramer?”
“I’m fine, thanks. You? We haven’t seen you here lately, have we? You haven’t forgotten us, I hope?” He still held Jolly’s hand in his own white one, smiling. He was an acutely handsome man, Jolly thought, startled at the revelation, except he was too short. Jolly felt nervous looking down at adults, which kept him nervous a good deal of the time.
“No, sir. I’m fine. Well—” he looked toward the people gathering after him on the stairs and attempted to disengage his hand without yanking.
“We haven’t heard you practicing the piano lately.” The minister’s dark eyes smiled directly into, albeit slightly up into, Jolly’s.
Jolly blushed. “How did you know about that? I didn’t think anyone knew I came in here to practice.”
“I’ve been here—back in my office—when you came in. I used to enjoy hearing you play. But you haven’t been here in a long time.” The man lifted his brows, awaiting an answer.
“No. No, sir, I haven’t,” Jolly said. “Well, we’re holding up the line.” He pulled his hand free and ducked into the sanctuary.
The preferred seats under the balcony were all pretty well taken by fat Ron Corcoran and his followers, so Jolly sat at the outside on the last row of regular seats. You had to have a good night’s sleep to keep up with Ron’s illustrated hymnals and running comments on the state of affairs as they occurred in the Morningside Baptist Church on Sunday morning.
From where Jolly sat he had a reasonable view of the whole church, and he began his old game of identifying its members by the backs of their heads. The church seated exactly a hundred and forty-four people (not counting the balcony, which was never used except for the ethereal sounds the choir affected from there at Christmas pageants, and the prized seats under the balcony) as Jolly well knew from past Sundays when he had counted one row across, nine, and the rows back, eight, multiplied, seventy-two, times two, a hundred and forty-four. Identifying the regular members of the congregation wasn’t difficult but it occupied a certain portion of an hour.
Near the front on the far right, so his good ear would be attuned, sat Brother Able Peckham, who seemed to have been sitting precisely there since shortly after the Crucifixion. Beside him sat his tiny speckled wife, who would be asleep as soon as the singing was through, the two cherries in her summer hat bobbing restfully as she snoozed. In her usual place, Mrs. Hacy’s broad arms were flung in either direction along the back of the pew, the better to reach any member of the brood under her discipleship. She believed no child was too young to attend Sunday morning service if properly attended by resounding snaps on the head at judicious moments.
Luke passed by, down the aisle, steered by his mother, whose jaw was set peculiarly. He exchanged a brief glance with Jolly, but it was enough to say, “Don’t call today. In fact, it’ll likely be a year before things settle down at my house.”
Jolly’s own mother came into the church and got caught in the choice of sitting beside Mrs. Shiverly, whom she “loathed and despised” or beside Anita Meaders, Luke’s mother. Jolly was relieved to see her sit beside Mrs. Shiverly, because at least
they
wouldn’t talk.
Breathless, the Sanic Sisters flowed into their pew after first shooshing away some strangers who hadn’t any idea there were reserved seats. Once settled, the Sisters checked the hymn numbers on the board and opened their personal morocco-bound hymnals, held them forward, prepared to sing. When the Sanic Sisters were in attendance, and they hadn’t missed a Sunday in anyone’s memory, there wasn’t any sense in the song leader or pianist trying to set a tempo, because there wasn’t anyone (outside of, perhaps, Mississippi Arney of Skull Valley) who could out-sing the Sisters in volume. A new minister always tried to outwit them at first by selecting obscure hymns with which they might not be familiar, but that always turned out to be a trio—the minister himself and the Sanic Sisters—because unless it was written by Mary Baker Eddy there wasn’t a hymn they hadn’t pretty well set to memory.
At eleven o’clock the door on the dais (on which hung the record of Sunday School attendance and offerings) swung open and the choir filed in. They were outfitted in maroon robes with white collars. The ladies deposited their purses at their feet as they sat. “Oh, no,” groaned Jolly to himself. “Old man Rainey’s going to sing.” Cleve Rainey graced the choir four or five times a year when he felt up to a solo, and his presence there should be publicized ahead of time, a good number of the congregation agreed, so they could stay away. Cleve was pushing sixty, and his tenor voice had given up twenty years earlier. Behind Cleve Rainey strode Mrs. Edhols’ Billy, pompous as a bantam rooster, a regular member of the adult choir, a fact Mrs. Edhols was pointing out to her neighbor.
From the door at the other side of the dais (on which hung the hymn numbers and scripture reading) entered the minister, who had spirited himself around the church in order to enter there. He surveyed his audience and then sat in his plush carved chair before the camouflaged baptismal tank—the swimming pool, as it was known by the irreverent young. The congregation began to fidget and crane to eye a particular vacant seat. There wasn’t any use to begin the services until Brother Ep Edward Clydefield occupied that pew. Once, a number of years ago, “Holy, Holy, Holy” was just at the amen point when Ep Edward entered, and he stood right where he was and made them do the whole thing over again from the beginning. The membership got the idea thereafter that services didn’t begin—if they were to maintain any decorum at all—until Brother Ep Edward had arrived. And Brother Ep Edward was the foremost cause of the mortgage’s being burned ten years ahead of schedule.
“Brother Ep Edward ain’t arrived,” whispered a lady beside Jolly, as if everyone didn’t know.
At five minutes past eleven, the old gentleman arrived at his pew in a regular suite of ushers. He wore his white perforated summer shoes and a white Panama suit (the only one ever known in Cortez) and handed his white straw to a solicitous usher. At his appearance the pianist broke into the run-through of “Holy,” and the congregation rose to its feet. To a visitor it would be hard to distinguish to whom the song was directed, God or Ep Edward.
As the service droned on, through the Morning Prayer, the Scripture Lesson, and the Weekly Announcements, Jolly felt his eyelids begin their protest. The room was hot, and the overhead fans whirled at just the right speed to mesmerize a person. Finally, the choir stood to sing the anthem, an expurgated setting of something by Handel, but the solo passage lent itself well to Cleve Rainey’s singing because you couldn’t tell the trills and runs from the natural wobbles in his voice.
The sermon began. Jolly settled farther into his seat, determined that by listening carefully he could stay awake for thirty-five more minutes.
“Ladies and gentlemen; brothers and sisters,” Harold Cramer began in his resonant, eleven-o’clock voice, “this morning I have chosen as my text, Jeremiah, Chapter Six, Verse Fifteen.” He paused as Bibles rustled, no one wishing to be the last to find the passage. (“Old Testament,” murmured the lady beside Jolly.) “I read: ‘Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the Lord.’ A-men.”