“You can help me,” I said. “You will, won’t you?”
But before she could reply, Harvey came back to the car with two cones. He gave one to me, and after licking the ice cream from the other he passed Hornette the empty cone to crunch.
“You go on and eat, Maude,” he said. “We got to look after our bodies.”
19. The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner
FLORIDA’S HOT EYE was shutting on the Gulf, confining us in a black after-image. We were on the porch, sitting together on the glider, kicking the floor. The regular swinging was like thought.
Hornette said, “You don’t know what you’re asking, girl.”
“What am I asking? Tell me, and I won’t say another word.”
She gave the porch an emphatic kick. “Carney don’t want you to see it.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “That’s why I want to.” Hornette considered this. She said, “I can’t help you.”
We rocked in blind night.
“So you do everything he says.”
“I do not,” she said crossly, making her eyebrows meet.
“Then help me,” I said. “Get me in — or else tell me what I’m missing.”
“I ain’t talking,” she said. She braked the glider by stomping on the porch. She looked around, then whispered, “You’ll have to see for yourself. But it sure ain’t going to be easy.”
The next morning, Mr. Biker knocked on my darkroom door. “Maudie!”
“Don’t come in — I’m processing!”
“There’s someone wants you out on the porch.”
I finished off the negatives (Boca Grande, alligator wrestler, swamps, and a nice one of a dog in a green celluloid eyeshade being walked by a tubby man wearing the same get-up on his head). Downstairs, I saw Mama on the glider.
“Maude,” she said, “who was that extraordinary man?”
“That’s Mr. Biker.”
“Is there something wrong with him?”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“He’s terribly small,” she said. She frowned at the porch. “If I’d known it was like this I would have made other arrangements for you.”
The voice of the patroness; but I let it pass. “I like it,” I said. “I’m going to town here. I’ve fixed up a darkroom in the attic. Mama, why are you dressed like that?”
She wore smoked glasses, a wide-brimmed hat and gloves. Instead of her usual handbag she was carrying a wicker basket.
“This is my traveling outfit. I’m taking a trip,” she said. “Coral Gables. That’s why I stopped in — I thought you might want to come along.”
“What about Papa?”
“He never comes.”
“You’ve been there before?”
“Every year,” she said. “Papa stays behind for the dinner.”
“Why don’t you go to the dinner?”
“Don’t be silly.” She tightened the strap on her basket. “It’s all men. I wouldn’t like it. It’s just Carney and his men friends. Besides, we’re not allowed. The Pig Dinner’s famous for that.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s how special it is,” said Mama proudly. “Now how about it? Coral Gables — just the two of us.”
Come on, daughter, she was saying. Put that old camera aside and start living. But I had made my choice.
“No thanks.”
After she went away Mr. Biker looked rather curious, as if he wanted to ask who she was. I wanted to be spared having to deny that she was my mother, or to explain that I had taken this trip to prove to my parents that I wasn’t theirs. If he had asked, I would have said, “She’s another Guggenheim.” He didn’t ask. He was small, but he was a real gentleman.
And he had, as I saw, other things on his mind. A change had come over the boarders. The people who had been so nice to each other, and just grand to me, got in the grip of a kind of tension. They quarreled, complained to Mrs. Fritts, slammed doors, that sort of thing. Brainless anger: they weren’t smart enough to argue, so they banged. Mrs. Fritts said nothing. When there was trouble, she studied the messages on her poker-work mottoes. One lunchtime, Digit smacked a ketchup bottle so hard with the finger he used in his act it flooded his scrambled eggs in red goo. He cursed it and flung the whole plate out the window, which mercifully was open. Then he went off, banging.
“He jess thew it out the winda,” said Orrie.
“Shit on him,” said Mr. Biker. He picked up the ketchup bottle, and seeing that it was nearly empty, said, “We ain’t got but one of these.”
“Don’t mind them,” said Mrs. Fritts, taking her eyes from YE ARE OF MORE VALUE THAN MANY SPARROWS. She breathed at me, “It’s the Pig Dinner.”
Mr. Biker looked smaller, Orrie more mangled, Digit fretful and foul-mouthed. The acrobats paced back and forth and threw themselves into chairs. This was the frenzy of circus folk; I had forgotten they were performers. Under pressure they had become grotesquely grumpy; they carried violence around with them; there was a threat of danger in their silences. And they excluded me: it was like blame, as if I represented that other world, the public, and was responsible for them making fools of themselves. At night, in my darkroom, I heard shouts and the sound of crockery smashing and “I ain’t doing it!” and “You gotta!” and little wails, like a child trapped in a chimney.
For my own peace of mind I printed pictures: Boca Grande, the boogie-men, the rain, Green Eyeshades; and when I heard the screeches I turned on the faucet hard to drown them. It was so strange: the loud footfalls in my ears and those peaceful footprints in my pictures. But that contradiction showed me how far my work had diverged from my life. “You still serious?” said Hornette the next evening.
I said I was.
“Cause I worked it out,” she said. Her voice was conspiratorial; she was secretive, with a bundle of clothes in her hands. “Try these on for size.”
She gave me a man’s jacket, a pair of striped trousers, a derby hat. I put them on and looked in the mirror. I was a man. She said, “That’s so they don’t eat you up.”
“I barely recognize myself.”
“It’s a damn good thing you ain’t pretty.”
“I hope you realize I’m going to be taking pictures. And I might exhibit them later on.”
“Girl,” she said, “I want you to show them all over creation.”
“You might get into trouble.”
“Sure thing,” she said. “Or Carney might. It’s his show, ain’t it?” And in her laugh I identified the little chimney-wail I had heard the previous night.
The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner was held in the tent I had seen being hoisted on the grounds of that so-called palace my first day in Verona. I was in my suit, but I think if I had been wearing a sandwich-board and snowshoes I would still have gone unnoticed, because the others were benumbed and rode in the back of the van like people being taken out in the dark to be shot.
I smelled cooking — an odor of woodsmoke and burned meat — as soon as we entered Carney’s grounds. After we parked, I peeked through the flap in the tent and saw them all, with red faces, shouting and laughing and finishing their meal. There were about a hundred of them, men in tuxedos, seated at tables which were arranged around a circus ring. In the center of the ring were embers in spokes, the smoldering wheel of a log fire; and on a spit the remains of a cooked pig, hacked apart, and only its tail and trotters intact. It was not hard to identify Carney. He had the place of honor and in front of him on a platter was a pig’s head, his spitting image, one meathead above the other, dead eyes in the thick folds of gleaming cheeks and that expression you see on the faces of the very fat — dumb swollen pain, as if the scowl has been roasted onto it.