“Thank you. That means something coming from a handsome young man. Still, no reason to break the commandment ‘I shalt not lie.’ I know I look an old fright.” Her laugh sounds older than her voice. “How are you settling in Memphis?” She pretends that I have just arrived a few weeks ago, dismissing the months of cowering in my parents’ converted attic.
“I like Memphis. I always liked coming here to visit Dad’s parents and the cousin about my age, Rut Jordan. Do you know his family?”
“That devil. He’s a charmer.” She fixes me in the eyes. “Last I heard he went off to Africa with his tail between his legs after stepping out on that lovely Demange girl.”
I smiled. “Yes, ma’am, he’s in the Peace Corps now, in Tanzania.”
“I would no more set foot in Africa. All the AIDS—those people ought to keep their diseases to themselves.”
“That’s not fair, Mrs. Crawford.” I’m not sure if she’s joking. “Well, I’m dying to go. Next time I get the urge to wander I’m going to see the Serengeti.”
“You just stay put and watch those wildlife programs on the TV. You’ve done enough wandering for a while.” She pinches my cheek with her little diamond-studded claw. “You’re a fine young man.”
Mrs. Crawford hobbles off and I see Katherine Horn talking to my father and a middle-aged couple. Katherine’s a single accountant and aerobics instructor about my age. I angle to the coffee table in the middle of the hall, pour a cup, then stand around smiling. Mom waves and smiles from across the room.
“The prodigal son,” says a hoarse voice.
“Hey, Katherine.” I turn and smile. “What did you think of Dad’s sermon?”
“Very inspiring.” Her brown hair is cut at her square jaw, parted on the side. She has alert, shrewd eyes. She’s handsome, not pretty, definitely sexy. You imagine she has a real no-nonsense manner in the office . . . or in bed.
“I thought it was sort of lame.” I laugh. “I’m sure I’ve heard it before as a kid.”
Katherine laughs and touches my sleeve for a moment. “What are you doing for fun now that you’ve come out in society?”
“I’m not allowed out after dark.” I frown in a mock pout.
Katherine laughs again. “You look like a picture of health to me.”
“They all know, don’t they?”
Katherine just barely nods.
“They all know that I’ve gone crazy and back.”
She rests her hand on my sleeve. “Most of them know that you were having a rough time for a while.”
“They don’t have a clue.” I chuckle uncomfortably. “But of course they couldn’t.”
“All of them are pulling for you to prosper now.”
“I want what they have,” I say.
“What’s that?” She takes her arm off my sleeve.
“What they have?” Please put your hand back, I think. “The goodness of God, going to church, the joy of living in the suburbs, cooking out, coming home in the twilight sky, having three stiff cocktails, and assaulting your wife in the armchair.”
Katherine laughs and touches my sleeve again. “You crack me up.”
“No, I’m the one who cracked up.” I sweep my arm around the hall. “Young and old, upper and lower middle class, a smattering of blacks, they all look content, like they know their place, where they came from, where they’re going.”
“Yes,” Katherine says. “I see that. But I see Mrs. Crosby, who has cancer. And Mr. Nichols, who just lost his wife. Old Mrs. Rathburn, who sits alone at home all day. I see a lot of suffering in that crowd.”
“No doubt.” I nod earnestly. “But they belong.”
“That they do,” Katherine says. “And so do you. Want to go to a movie tonight? I want to see
Pretty Woman
.”
Construction manager. Twenty-four thousand bucks a year. I made more as a carpenter on Nantucket but the DA told me never to go back there, so it’s not exactly an option. William George, a heavyset guy in his fifties who’s building five faux Victorians on Mud Island, hires me to do his legwork, save him from hanging around the sites all day so he can go fishing. Mom gives me her credit card to go buy khakis at the Gap, rugged button-downs at Patagonia, dress the part. Dad drives me in his new LeSabre with a car phone, a far cry from the sedans he would drive into the ground the first thirty years of his ministry, out east to the Buick dealer who gives the diocese a break on the clergy’s cars. We pick out an ’87 Jeep Cherokee, three years old, thirty thousand miles, clean. They let me drive it off the lot on Dad’s word that he’ll organize a loan with First Tennessee the next day. I’m ready to go to work. Instant yuppie.
The main crew is three first-rate trim carpenters a few years older than me: Steve Sullivan, Garland Webb, Lane Edge, graduates of the Memphis College of Art, who paint and sculpt on the side. At the end of the first week Garland invites me on a river trip. We meet at the yacht club, three roofed docks with about forty boats on Mud Island. People are drinking and picnicking on the decks of the houseboats, which look like floating trailers. Garland and his wife, Carol, who works at a real estate agency downtown, take me upriver in their ski boat to an island near the Arkansas bank. We collect shells and interesting bits of driftwood. Smoking a joint, they offer me a toke. I’d like to take a hit. I’d like to feel completely alive. The meds seem to level off my emotions, no pain, but no real joy. I miss the magic, the wonder of the river and the wide horizon, the lust for life. I feel like I’m not really here. I reach for the spliff, and the AA groups at Taunton, at Bridgewater, the doctors driving in the idea that drugs, even grass, can trigger a manic episode, all comes flashing back and I just say, “Nah, thanks.”
William George lists me as the sales agent for the properties and I take the real estate exam and get my license. My days pass quickly, staying on top of subcontractors, making sure all the supplies are on the job at the right time, jawing with the crew, meeting prospective buyers. In the evenings I start going to hear live music, blues at a tiny juke called Wild Bill’s, and folk-rock journeymen like Steve Forbert and James McMurtry at the High Tone. Lane Edge plays guitar and sometimes I go over to his house and jam. I’m not sure if I want to buy a guitar, too many humiliating memories of jumping up onstage in Nantucket. Lane’s better than me so I pick up a few licks. Two weeks pass, I collect my paycheck, mail in the car payment, put a couple of hundred dollars in the bank. I know I’m lucky. I ought to be out on the street.
“Seems like I never meet any girls that I can connect with in Memphis,” I say loudly over bar noise at the Blue Monkey to Lane Edge.
“You want something unusual, a one-off, a unique specimen.” Lane is six-three and very skinny. He holds his long arms in front of him, fingers interlaced, palms out, and cracks his knuckles.
“Aren’t we all one-offs?” I sip a beer. Dr. Fielding says a couple of drinks a day is okay, now that I’m off the antipsychotics. I drink two glasses of water between each glass of beer or wine and spend a fair amount of time in the toilet but I never get more than a mild, comfortable buzz.
“Oh, no, some people come off conveyor belts.” Lane grins and nods at some women at a table, all of them with heavy makeup, fake tits, bleached hair.
“Memphis’s finest,” I say.
“Maybe you need an earth mama.”
“I do respect canoeing skills in a woman.”
“An artist?” Lane holds his chin like Rodin’s thinker. “No, artists have egos. If I trade Lynn in for a new model, I’m mail-ordering an Oriental who doesn’t give me any lip, or better yet doesn’t even speak English. That’s my advice to you. Start hanging around Saigon Le and all those Cong shops over on Cleveland. Find a nice Vietnamese girl.”
“You’ll never leave Lynn.” I find myself taking everyone literally even when I know that they are joking. “You’re lucky. She’s smart, sexy, funny, everything a man could ask for.”
“You’re not listening to me, boy. Ego, lad. You have to consider the ego.” He tilts his long neck back and drains the last swigs of a bottle of Tecate, then sets it on the counter and turns it very slowly, whispers, “You want someone you can dominate down to the last drop.”
“I don’t want a slave.” I tilt an empty glass of ice water to my lips, catch the slice of lemon in my mouth, and say almost unintelligibly, “I want a goddess.”
“You mean like a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit model?”
“Naaa.” I spit out the lemon. “Lame-, I mean Lane-brain, I mean someone like her.”
Two girls come in out of the night and wait by the hostess station. One’s tall with long brown hair and a gentle, bemused face, while the dark eyes of the other, who only comes to her chin, are striking at twenty feet, maybe green, so rare that color. She wears her hair short, almost like a boy’s, a simple white button-up blouse with no sleeves or collar, slim-cut khakis, and red cowboy boots. As she turns to speak to her friend, I see that her ass is like a small melon, hardly there at all. I say, “Holly Golightly.”
“Those two dykes?” Lane raises his hand for the bartender.
“You think they’re lesbians?” I crush some ice in my mouth.
“Know for a fact. The tall one’s the catcher and the short one with the butch haircut is the pitcher. Don’t go getting between two lezzies. Get your balls chopped off.”
The hostess leads them to a table not far from where we’re sitting at the bar and I say, “You’re full of shit, Lane. They’re not lesbians.”
“Famous lesbians,” Lane says. “Most famous lesbians in West Arkansas. The tall one’s called Bonnie and the little one goes by Clyde.”
“Those two?”
“Yep.” Lane pops a lemon slice into the tall neck of the Tecate bottle.
“I heard of them.”
Lane scrutinizes my face.
“Yeah.” I take a swig off Lane’s beer. “One night they took a guy hostage who’d beaten up his girlfriend, a friend of theirs back in Polecat Junction. At gunpoint they took him to the local shit-kicker dive and made him and his best pal, another wife-beater type, give each other blow jobs in front of a crowd of rednecks. The biggest one started to cry.”
“You heard about that way up in Nantucket?” Lane laughs.
“Yeah.” I’m conscious of how I’m enjoying myself, the simple pleasure. “The big one cried when he came in his pal’s mouth in front of fifty of his farmer buddies. The girls left the gun on the doormat of the bar on the way out. Turns out it was plastic. Obviously they haven’t been back to Polecat since.”
I see that Bonnie and Holly are watching us, drawn to our laughter. I catch their waitress’s eye and when she comes over ask her, “Would you ask those young ladies if they would like a drink for their heroics in West Arkansas.”
“Their heroics in West Arkansas?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The waitress crosses to their table. They look over at us with indifferent expressions, speak to themselves, shake their heads emphatically. The waitress returns looking grim. She says, “They say you must have mistaken them for someone else.”
“I told you they weren’t Bonnie and Clyde,” Lane says.
“They refuse your drink,” the waitress goes on.
“Ouch,” Lane says.
“Unless you go and sit at their table.” She smiles, darts off.
“I’m a married man,” Lane says, moving toward their table.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t read the menu.”
“Evening, ladies.” Lane sits next to the tall one. I sit down next to Holly Golightly. “I’m Lane and this here reprobate is Cage.”
“Alli,” the tall one says, “and my friend Samantha, or Sam.”
Lane raises his eyebrows at me discreetly at the mention of the masculine name. He calls the waitress over and we order, then he says, “Yeah, Cage was trying to convince me that y’all were famous lesbians from Arkansas.”
“Now, hold on . . .” I feel myself blushing. I expect them to be offended but they only look at each other and smile. Lane keeps going, the whole fish story, and the girls are laughing and Sam keeps glancing at me. Soon all four of us are laughing.
“My, what an imagination,” Sam says. “What does that say about you?”
“I’ve been feminized,” I reply. “I’m close to my mama.”
“That’s a good quality.” Sam’s eyes aren’t green after all but brown. Her heart-shaped face has a delicate nose and a pretty mouth with full lips. “You from Memphis?”
“Nah, I just moved here a couple of months ago.” I’m not telling anyone about the long stint in my parents’ attic, any more than I would carry around a banner with
Mentally Ill
sewn on it. “My parents are here. My dad’s from here. What about you?”
“I live here with my little boy.” She watches my eyes. “I grew up in Mississippi and went to Rhodes, went back to Jackson and got married. Came back here after I got divorced. I’ve got a sister here.”
“How old’s your boy? What’s his name?”
“Ray. He’s five.”
“Ray, that’s nice. What a great age. I had a blast when I was five. We lived at the edge of the mountains, outside Knoxville. My dad used to take us up in the Smokies. Does Ray like the woods?”
“Ray loves the woods.” She has a calm presence. She tells me she’s gone back to her maiden name, Samantha Anne Carr. She owns a vintage clothing place called Time’s Arrow at a shady intersection in midtown which has a number of cafés, antique stores, gift shops, restaurants, a couple of blocks of pastel Haight-Ashbury ambience. She and Ray rent an old house in midtown, a converted duplex. Ray spends most of his weekends down in Jackson with his father, a lawyer who has remarried.
“I’ve seen Time’s Arrow.” For some reason I don’t want to think about her husband, ex or not. “Looks nice. Never been inside, though I think I’ve seen you blurry through that old plate glass floating around in there.”
Sam’s laugh is delicate. She’s a hummingbird. She leans her head forward and slides her hand from her forehead through her hair, holds it back.
In August the unfinished tin-roofed structures in Harbor Town are like the hot boxes used to torture prisoners in
Cool Hand Luke
. Lane Edge tries to convince the crew that they should arrive on the job at first light, take a long siesta from noon to four, then work again until dark falls after nine, but no one else will go for it. Lane begins to work solo, on Mexican time.
In the long summer twilight we carry a canoe out the front door of Garret Stoval’s converted warehouse loft through his little yard, over the Illinois Central tracks, down a hundred and fifty feet of sloping grass levee, across Riverside Drive, and down another fifty yards of broken stone levee.