Adazee told me I could follow her a couple miles down the road to a place called Worm’s. I picked up the cake from my mother’s dining-room table and left the house without even locking up. If it matters, Adazee drove the bakery’s van, which had bumper stickers that read PASTRY CHEFS DO IT UNTIL THEY’RE GLAZED and REAL MEN EAT MUFFINS.
Listen, I loved Louise before she took off, and I love her now. She was and is a beautiful, smart woman. I met her in college. She studied pre-veterinary, didn’t get into vet school — man, that’s harder than getting into med school — and got a job at AfriCall of the Wild, a fancy over-bloated petting zoo that catered to school groups and drew the ire of PETA, the regular zoo in Columbia, and the NAACP, according to Louise. She fed old ex-circus lions and elephants. She mucked stalls. I don’t think her father ever said anything about how his investment in her college education didn’t exactly pay off, but I can’t be sure. He didn’t talk much to me.
After we parked side by side and got on the sidewalk near the bar, I said to Adazee, “You seem to be a beautiful, smart woman.” Looking back, it was all the goddamn sugar from the Misty cake. I doubt I would’ve been so bold without a diabetic onslaught on the horizon. “I don’t need to have a drink anymore. If you don’t want to go to the bar, that’s fine by me.”
“Well, I believe I might have carpal tunnel from the whisk. I need a drink every day. And just so you know”—she took off her apron as we walked in—“you’re old enough to be my father, so don’t get any ideas. I mean, I’m all excited to hang out with you and everything, but not in a romantic way.”
I said, of course, “I’m not but forty. How old are you?”
This is where I saw that Alcatraz shirt, and her — again, I still loved Louise, so it’s not like I started limping across the street — gigantic, ungainly breasts. Between dealing with a whisk, hunching over a mixer, and standing on her feet all day as a chef of one sort or another, Adazee had nothing but a scoliosistic future teeming with greedy chiropractors and hyperbolic support-brassiere manufacturers.
She said, “I’m twenty-nine. According to that book you’re in, there has been an eleven-year-old daddy, so there. Or maybe someone around here was eleven, I forget.” She opened the door for me so I didn’t drop the cake. To the man behind the bar she said, “Hey, Worm. You remember Buzz Steadman, don’t you?”
I knew Worm from the old days growing up in Calloustown. Back then he went by plain Stuart, as far as I could remember. He was one of the Harrell clan. Worm said, “No. Never heard of him,” like that, which is what everyone had always said to me, even when I came back home for Christmas during college.
We were the only patrons. Stuart Harrell stood behind the counter, half of his gray short-sleeved shirt untucked. He wore work boots and blue jeans and could’ve been mistaken for most meter readers in the area. One of his eyes seemed to go off in a funny direction at times, and he might’ve cut his own hair. The place looked like every neighborhood bar I’d come across during all my years traveling the Carolinas after meeting in a high school counselor’s conference room with students who planned to take the SAT again in order to make a 420 on both parts so they could say “Four-twenty!” as often as possible and light a joint. Dark walls and black barstools with foam rubber hemorrhaging out of mid-cushion rips. Lampshades that advertised Pabst and Budweiser. Burn marks trenching the wooden counter. Last year’s calendar up on the wall from an auto parts company. I said, “Hey, Stuart. Or Worm.” Instead of music, a man spoke over the bar’s speakers. I said, “What’s that?” and pointed to the wall.
Worm said, “Some kind of made-up ordinance. Before they’d let me open up this bar — we’re within a hundred yards of a church — I had to agree to let Reverend Mixon make me play some cassette tapes he made of sermons he’s said. Sometimes he sends in members of his congregation to check me out, see if I’m actually playing them. They drink and drink and drink, and all the time say they’re making sure I’m playing his goddamn sermons. I don’t know what’s worse — having to play his sermons, or when the off-key Calloustown Second Baptist Church choir starts singing.”
Adazee said, “I’ll have a screwdriver.”
Worm said to me, “I’m not supposed to serve you anything stronger than mixer. Your ex-wife called up and said she figured you might be coming by here soon.”
I didn’t go, “I thought you didn’t know me.” I said, “I don’t want anything to drink anymore. It passed. You got a Dr. Pepper back there?”
He reached in the cold box and pulled out a can. “Four dollars. We’re having a hard time getting these in. Supply and demand.” Now, understand, in the old days I wouldn’t have put up with a man who enjoyed being called Worm and who prided himself on getting one over on a man who’d remained in the Guinness World Record book for over twenty-five years. But I’d been reading up on some breathing techniques, and along with the muscle relaxers I took quadra-daily, I could handle just about every situation outside of the minor pangs of remembrance.
I said, “Can I run a tab?”
He handed Adazee her drink. Worm said, “I’da thought you’d want a tequila, what with all those Mexican jumping beans you got in your house.”
I said, “A-HA!” like that, and stood up. “If you don’t remember my living in Calloustown back in the day and even going to school with you, how do you know about those jumping beans?” Adazee didn’t seem affected whatsoever. She looked at herself in the mirror and brushed flour out of her hair.
Here’s the story: While driving around from high school to high school over the years, I noticed that no convenience stores sold those little plastic boxes — two by two by one inch deep — that held Mexican jumping beans. I thought, man, as a little kid I loved having those things around, and listening to them clack when I turned my desk lamp on. I thought, America has fallen into a deep chasm in regards to national pride, and perhaps it all goes back to small children not being able to understand the inherent hopeless qualities of the Mexican jumping bean. Sometimes while talking to prospective students I asked them about Mexican jumping beans, and they had no clue what I was talking about, or the smarter kids would accuse me of being politically incorrect.
So in a moment of weakness, between losing my job, my mother dying, and my father sending me a letter from prison asking me to come visit him some time and bring a cake with a sharp knife inside so he could cut off his cellmate’s dick, I took out my savings, cashed in my retirement, and contacted a man named Guillermo down in the state of Chihuahua, who got me in contact with an ex-drug smuggler named Jorge. Meanwhile, I talked to some people at PlastiConCo and ordered little clear jumping bean containers that snapped open and shut. I typed up little instructions to be placed inside the boxes that pointed out that the Mexican jumping bean was really a moth larva living inside a pod produced by a shrub, and that the beans needed to be watered at times, and that the larva responded to heat.
I went all out. The beans showed up at my house in six boxes with COFFEE stamped on the outsides because, as it ended up, it was illegal to mail the things across a border without proper documentation and whatnot. I tried not to think about how some guy in Mexico was my father’s doppelganger. Inside the boxes — which could’ve held large microwaves, or medium-sized television sets — were burlap bags with COFFEE stamped on them. In retrospect, I should be surprised that they even showed up. It would’ve been easy for my sending money down to Guillermo, who would take a cut before sending money to Jorge, and then those two hombres plain disappearing.