A big hello from Motor City. Sorry you missed your Christmas card this year, but I was busy recuperating from major surgery and just couldn’t find the time. I know how you enjoy news of Little Jerry and me. The streets are covered with ice now and the car won’t run, but we’re pushing on ahead and who needed a set of ovaries anyway? I’m running my own massage studio, living in an apartment upstairs with a view of the switching yards. Little Jerry is with me and a constant inspiration these days. Did you know he wants to be a race driver just like his Dad! Isn’t that sweet?
Many happy returns,
Shelly
There wasn’t a single thing to drink in the house … Except for this dusty bottle of grain alcohol under the kitchen sink. Was that the stuff that made you deaf or blind or something? Just the smell of it made his eyes water. How bad could it be? He remembered a gobbling geek named Suggs who used to drink shoe polish strained through a felt hat; but then, after biting the heads off mice every time he could muster a good crowd, probably anything would do.
Still, no skull-and-bones on the label. Just a little taste then. A tablespoon dispersed in grapefruit juice, one dose of tonic for his nerves.
When Tildy returned home that evening she did not find her husband sprawled across the floor like a bag of laundry. She did not find him at all; just an empty glass on the kitchen table, a disarrangement of solvents and cleansers on the floor.
Nothing to be alarmed about. She heated a can of soup and filed her nails. Maybe he was lurking in a closet, waiting for her to pass so he could jump out and scare her breathless. Like a little boy sometimes. Then she heard the siren wail outside. She listened hard, wanting it to go on and on and fade in the far distance. But it stopped close by, as she somehow knew it would.
She ran out to the road and stopped. Voices yowling through the trees, a smell of smoke. Something dire going down at the Keyes place. Tildy broke into a sprint, knees pumping high, sneakers slapping hard on the pavement. Up ahead, an undulating orange glow. Down the bending driveway she could see the pump truck setting up, playing out hose. The Keyes outhouse, swaddled in flames, was tipping backward, igniting refuse and scrap lumber stacked around it. Cars flashed by her, volunteer firemen with their domelights spinning. Watching impassively from a bowed front porch, Mrs. Keyes sipped on a beer and shooed her children inside. Just as quickly one of them would pop back through the hole in the screen door and scramble with excitement back and forth along the railing. Water churned out the nozzle now, blowing a hole in the blazing outhouse wall. The firemen cheered themselves.
Then, from some deeper region of darkness, came a more familiar voice — Karl’s. “Black widows,” he screamed. “You can’t even burn ’em out.”
Tildy had to take an advance on her salary to cover the costs, a couple hundred to cool the Keyeses’ anger and persuade them not to press charges, and another seventy or eighty for building materials. Karl, on Tildy’s orders, had agreed to rebuild the privy himself.
“I can’t think of anyone more qualified,” she said, driving him home from jail on Saturday afternoon. “I mean that’s your business. Isn’t it, donniker man?”
“Okay, okay. Don’t jump salty on me. I know I deserve it but …” Karl looked down, digging into a seam of the upholstery with his fingers. “But it wasn’t really me did it. It was like me standing outside my body and watching.”
“Just a bad dream, huh?” Tildy tromped on the gas pedal and the Galaxie roared through the intersection streaming blue smoke.
But she couldn’t stay mad at him long. With the wind out of his sails he was bobbing and drifting like an innertube, her fumbling old sad sack again. He moped and whimpered and fawned, promising he’d never go near alcohol again. Oh yes, he should be whipped for treating her this way, putting shame and botheration on her when every week she brought the bacon home. Tildy listened quietly with her eyes half shut. It was almost comforting, this noise, like the lowing of cows.
They had cold cuts and macaroni salad for lunch, then a short nap, with Karl corkscrewing around the mattress but not daring to touch her. Finally, she took his hand and held it.
“Either keep still or get out of bed.”
From under a bulwark of pillows she heard his retreating steps and a thick, low voice as the radio snapped on, low and steady as wind, more soothing than music.
Tildy suction-cupped a sign to the inside of the door — BACK AT in fat white letters and a clock face underneath with movable tin hands. Nudging them forward to 11:15, generously allowing herself a full half hour, she turned the lock, went back to the stockroom and lit up a joint. The very last crumbs of the bag Looie had pressed on her as a memento of their passion. Dear sweet Looie, and she could barely remember the contours of his face. It was good dope, though. Two or three drags and there was that tightness across her chest, a twitching in her brain like an old motor coming to life. Tildy held the smoke in her lungs until she was dizzy, and then, letting go, could hear for a few seconds the tomtom rhythm of her pumping blood before it faded out like the end of a record. An easy mark for distraction now, reading along the wall of a box — STORE AWAY FROM HEAT PACKED AT CENTRAL DIST. CTR. FAIRMEADOW, INDIANA — wondering what Fairmeadow looked like, factory town with an endless strip of muffler shops and fried-chicken stands and not a meadow in sight.
The joint had gone out in her fingers, a blackened stem she stashed for later in the cellophane of her cigarette pack. Envelope glue was what her dry mouth tasted like; and it was suddenly spooky back there with the cartons and shredded paper, an interrogation room. She went and sat behind the register, sucking mints and scratching pictures on a ledger pad: palm trees, a sofa, free-floating breasts.
Someone banging on the door. Only five after but they wouldn’t go away. Tildy stumbled coming off the stool and banged her hip on the edge of the counter. A skinny woman peered through the glass, deep acne scars, lavender eye shadow and pencil marks on upper and lower lids like sun rays in a child’s drawing, stringy blond hair that hung down past her shoulder blades. Tildy stood blinking, rubbing her hip.
“Come on, come on. I really need some stuff.”
My time is your time. Shrugging, Tildy pulled the door open, kicked a rubber wedge under it to let the breeze in. A little late. The woman sniffed ostentatiously, winked.
“I’ll find what I need. You go on back to whatever you were doing.”
She had chains around her neck, bracelets crowded on both wrists and every time she moved it was like somebody shaking a jar of nails. Tildy hung there beside her, rising and falling on the balls of her feet and staring like an imbecile. The woman backed away, tugging at the sleeves of her black cowboy shirt.
“I’d take five if I was you, honey. Your eyes look like silver dollars.”
Nobody asked you, but okay. Tildy climbed onto the stool and tried to look busy pushing papers around. Flitting among the shelves the woman studied bottles and spray cans intently, lips moving as she read the labels; and then her eyes would roll to one side and catch Tildy doing it too. They were watching each other, appraising. Tildy wanted to start a conversation, but felt timid and blocked. What the hell was going on? All the shivery tension of a blind date.
“I’m looking for a conditioner.”
“What?”
“It’s just so lifeless.” Raking fingers down her scalp. “I should have it cut off…. But if it’s all right, lemme ask what you use on your hair.”
“Nothing.”
“Well, nothing really works for you. It’s got a kind of innocent look, like, I don’t know, some silent-movie star.”
Not very surreptitiously, the woman ripped open a bag of malted milk balls and ate a few. She browsed at the magazine rack and tried on several pairs of rubber sandals. Squatting on the floor and talking to herself, she experimented with different hues of nail polish, didn’t bother to screw the caps back on the bottles. Tildy didn’t bother to camouflage her amazement, either. She envied this one’s gall.