“I wish you’d worn your Mexican pleated shirt.”
“Why?”
“You look just like Rod McKuen, if you had more hair.”
“He’s an old man.”
“No, he’s not. Look.” She showed me his picture on the back of her book, Rod hoofing it along a California beach, arms open to the sea gulls.
“That was twenty years ago.”
“Let’s have a picnic here.”
“We will.”
“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.”
“Yes, thou.”
That was last month. I’ve been working on this room ever since. Today I finish the job. No bowerbird ever prepared a bower for his love more carefully.
The hard work was done last week, Delco generator installed downstairs, hose run two hundred feet from the Esso station faucet up through the bathroom window.
Room 203 still has suspicious smells. Pull back curtains, open front panels and bathroom window to get a breeze. Unpack from doctor’s bag and line up on dresser: one saniflush, one wick deodorizer, one tube of cold solder, one roll of toilet paper, one boxed gift copy of Stanyan Street, one brass shower head, one jar of instant coffee.
Half an hour and my work is done, floors mopped, fungoid mattresses and horrid foam-rubber pillows slung over balcony rail to sun, coffee-maker restocked, graffiti wiped from wall revealing original hunt-and-hound design, Laughing Cavalier straightened, ancient color TV and bed vibrator plugged into Delco lead, shower head screwed onto hose from Esso station and tested (hot bitter hose water), Stanyan Street lined up with the Gideon.
Test vibrator: sit on bed and drop in quarter. Z-Z-Z-Z-Z goes the vibrator and suddenly I am thinking not of Moira but of Samantha, my dead daughter, and the times she and I and Doris used to travel in the Auto Age all over the U.S.A. and Samantha would explore the motel and drop coins in every slot. First off she’d have found the Slepe-Eze and fed it a quarter.
Tears spurt from my eyes. Removing a pint of Early Times from my bag, I sit on the humming bed and sip a few drinks.
Why does desire turn to grief and memory strike at the heart?
Off to town. Past empty Saint Michael’s Church and school, a yellow brick dairy-barn-with-silo.
Here I went to mass with Samantha, happy as a man could be, ate Christ and held him to his word, if you eat me you’ll have life in you, so I had life in me. After mass we’d walk home to Paradise through the violet evening, the evening star hard by the red light of the TV tower like a ruby and diamond in the plush velvet sky, and I’d skip with happiness, cut the fool like David while Samantha told elephant jokes, go home, light the briquets, drink six toddies, sing Tantum Ergo, and “Deh vieni alla finestra” from Don Giovanni and, while Samantha watched Gentle Ben, invite Doris out under the Mobile pinks, Doris as lusty and merry a wife then as a man could have, a fine ex-Episcopal ex-Apple Queen from the Shenandoah Valley. Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you.
Cliff swallows are nesting in the fenestrated concrete screen in front of Saint Michael’s.
In this Catholic church, the center did not hold. It split in three, Monsignor Schleifkopf cutting out to the right, Father Kev Kevin to the left, leaving Father Smith. There is little to be said about Father Smith since he is in no way remarkable, having been a good and faithful if undistinguished priest for twenty-five years, having baptized the newborn into a new life, married lovers, shriven sinners, comforted the sick, visited the poor and imprisoned, anointed the dying, buried the dead. He had his faults. He was a gray stiff man. Like me, he was thought to drink and on occasion was packed off, looking only a bit grayer and stiffer than usual, to a Gulf Coast home for addled priests. Now he and his little flock are looking for a new home, I hear, having used for a while a Pentecostal church and later Paradise Lanes, my bowling alley here in the plaza, until it became too dangerous.
The plaza is empty now save for the rusting hulks of cars abandoned or burned in the time of troubles.
Five and a half years ago, on Christmas Eve, Paradise Plaza was sacked by Bantu guerrillas, foraying up out of the swamp. Store windows were smashed, the new Sears looted, some stores burned, cops shot up by Bantus, Bantus shot up by cops. Noncombatants fled, Christmas shoppers, storekeepers, motel occupants, drive-in movie patrons watching Homo Hijinks. Monsignor Schleifkopf left by the front door of the church, abandoning his burning Buick and golf clubs in the garage, where they are to this day. Nobody came back these five and a half years save lovers and bums and drugheads and in the end only the original denizens of the swamp, owls, alligators, and moccasins.
I should have known trouble was brewing. The night before, Leroy Ledbetter had kicked out a black couple from Tougaloo who wanted to bowl at Paradise Lanes. That very morning, walking to town, I met Nellie Bledsoe, who told me her cook had quit and she was ready “to shoot some niggers.”
“Eh? What? What’s that? My God,” I said, “you don’t mean you want to shoot some niggers because your cook quit.”
“Oh yes I do!” she cried, laughing and winking and kneading her arm. “Don’t you know what they do?”
“What?”
“They go on welfare and have their illegitimate nigger babies and get paid for it, paid more than they make working.”
“Yes, but you’re not saying that you’re going out and—”
“Oh yes I am!” says Nellie, winking and laughing. “Ho Ho Ho!”
Earlier the same morning, at six, a young jaundiced Bantu came up out of the swamp and appeared at my “enclosed patio” to be treated for liver flukes.
After I gave him his shot, he too winked at me with his yellow eye.
“I can’t pay you now, Doc, but since you’re so nice, we won’t shoot you when the shooting starts.”
“Who are you planning to shoot?”
“Anybody who gets in our way.”
“In the way of what?”
“In the way of our taking this goddamn parish, Doc,” he said, pulling out a copy of Fanon with one hand and patting a bulge under his coat with the other.
“My God, you’re not really going to shoot anybody, are you?”
“We’re taking over, Doc.”
“Why don’t you take over by the vote? You got the vote and there are more of you than of us.”
“Shit on voting, Doc.”
There was something in the air all right
On McArthur Boulevard now, a defunct parkway that deadends in a weedy lot and an ancient putt-putt course. Follow it as far as the L & N overpass and take the shortcut to town through Happy Hollow.
A bit shaky now, faintified but not hungry. The Early Times is not sitting well.
The thunderhead fills the whole eastern sky. A hot wind blows me toward it over the asphalt playground of the school. A chain rings against a flagpole.
The short cut turns out to be a mistake. Happy Hollow is a hot airless hole. The sun slants down like a laser. My stomach churns acid. When did I eat last?
The bare ground between the shacks and under the chinaberry trees never dries out. Where the sun does strike, the earth steams and gives off a smell of dishwater and chicken fat. Duck eggs rise in my throat.
But people seem happy here. Happy pot-bellied picaninnies play in the alley. Old folk rock on the porches. The unhappy young men are gone. The kindly old folk doff their caps politely. Yellow yarddogs lie chained to the chinaberry trees. They lift an eyebrow and snarl as I pass.
It is collection day. Up one side of the alley goes Moon Mullins collecting rent for his shacks. Down the other side goes old Mr. Jack Bourgeois collecting burial-insurance premiums. Both are cheerful and good-humored with their clients, exchanging jokes and pleasantries at each shack before moving on. Both collect in exactly the same way. If the householder is sitting on his porch, he will pass the time of day and hand down the money to the collector, who stands on the ground. If the porch is vacant, the collector will put his foot on the second step, rest an elbow on his knee and rap the porch floor with his knuckles, all the while looking down at the ground with a musing expression. Old Mr. Jack bangs the porch with his fat premium book.