Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel (34 page)

I am very late with my period and I am scared shitless. If I am pregnant, I will kill myself. Surely I’m not. I can’t be. I’ve never been this late in my life.

Oh, shit!

It’s been eight days. I don’t know what to do, and just when everything was going so good. I asked Tootie if you could get pregnant the first time you did it and she said, “Yes, it happens all the time.” How could I have been so stupid? I don’t have anyone to blame but myself. I will have to tell Mr. Cecil. I don’t know who else I can talk to. I have been horseback riding every day and I have had about a hundred hot baths, but no luck.

I told Mr. Cecil I was pregnant and he was very upset for me. He called all the Cecilettes to see if they knew where I could go and get an abortion, but not one of them knew anybody. So we went to see Paris Knights and she said the only one she knew that would do it had died.

Mr. Cecil came over to see me last night and told me he had thought about it, and wanted to marry me and raise the child. He tried to make light of it by saying it was his duty because after all, he had found me the job as the weather girl and the last weather girl had gotten pregnant, too. He thinks pregnancy must be one of the hazards of being a weather girl. I was really touched he would do that for me, but I just can’t. I love Mr. Cecil, but not that way. I sat up all night trying to figure out something when I remembered someone!

I placed a person-to-person call to Peachy Wigham and told her. She said for me to hold the phone. And came back on after about two minutes and told me to get down to her as soon as I could. I am leaving tomorrow right after I finish doing my weather report. God bless Peachy Wigham!

On the bus I had some time to think about what I was doing. The idea that I might die down there on the abortion table scared me to death. I kept thinking about what was going to happen if I did live through it. How was I going to feel? Would I be sorry someday? Momma had said having a baby was the most painful thing in the world. I got to looking at her ring. Thank God she didn’t know I was in trouble.

I must have changed my mind about a hundred times about whether or not to go through with it. I wrote out a will, then tore it up. By the time the bus arrived in Magnolia Springs I was a nervous wreck and my brains felt like scrambled eggs. I went to the bathroom at the filling station and put some cold water on my face and sat down on the floor. Then I combed my hair and used the bathroom and guess who started her period! Me! I was never so happy in my life. I started screaming and yelling and carrying on until the man at the filling station banged on the door and asked if I was all right. And to think I had always complained about having my period! From now on I will have a party every month when I start. I couldn’t wait to tell Peachy, but when I got to the Elite Nightspot, only Ula Sour was there. After I told Ula my good news, she laughed her head off. She thinks I scared myself so bad I probably stopped myself from having a period.

Ula called Peachy at the mortuary and told her to come on home, that everything was all right. I was glad to see Peachy and she was glad to see me. I found out that Felix, my cat, had died of old age, but they had a new one they loved a lot even though it was ugly. I spent the night, and we had a wonderful time. Peachy serves the best fifty-year-old bourbon in the world.

When I was leaving the next morning, I told Peachy I was sorry I had caused her so much trouble and would be glad to pay whoever it was that was going to do the abortion. She said to forget it.

She wouldn’t tell me who the person was who would have performed the abortion, but on my way home on the bus, it dawned on me that the person was Peachy Wigham herself. That’s why she hadn’t been there when I arrived. She was down at the mortuary getting things ready. Now that it’s all over and I have had some time to think, I still don’t know if I would have gone through with it or not. God bless Peachy Wigham anyway.

Years ago Daddy told me the reason she never got arrested was because she knew a secret about the sheriff’s daughter. Now I know what it was. If only Pickle could have gotten to her!

I went to work this morning and the manager of the TV station, Mr. Baers, called me into his office right after my weather report. He said there had been the biggest floods in the Midwest in twenty-five years and asked what the hell was all my weather doing in California where they were having a drought.

I didn’t have a good answer for him, so I told him I had just been moving Miss Pat’s, the five o’clock weather girl’s symbols a little to the right, and it had always worked out OK before.

When he heard that, he turned red in the face! Can you imagine getting that excited over the weather? He buzzed his secretary and ordered her to get Miss Pat in there right away. When Miss Pat came in, he said, “Did you know that this idiot has been moving your symbols every morning and that she doesn’t know a damn thing about the weather?”

She just looked at me all surprised and said, “Oh, no. This is terrible because I’ve been moving yours every night.”

You should have heard Mr. Baers! He pitched a fit and said,
“How dare you screw around with the weather! All the farmers are depending on this station to give them the correct weather forecast.” He said we two were probably single-handedly responsible for the failure of crops all over the state of Mississippi. Anyway, we both got fired. Some man that plays Bozo the Clown in the afternoon is now doing both reports.

I felt real bad for Miss Pat, getting fired like that, because she is very nice. The only thing the matter with her is she uses too much hair spray. A newsman at the station told me that when a tornado hit Hattiesburg and Miss Pat went outside to get in her car right in the middle of it, her blouse was blown off but her hair never moved.

I have a new job at the A to Z Rental Company making $75 a week. I sit in a big warehouse and answer the phone, and if anyone comes in, I rent them whatever they want. We have everything … hospital and sickroom supplies, beds, and party supplies, punch bowls, silver, wheelchairs, crutches, even artificial legs and arms. Can you imagine anyone wanting to rent a wooden leg? I’ve been here for two days and nobody has rented anything yet, so it’s very easy. I just go in the morning and stay all day, and at five o’clock I close and go home. The only bad part is it is lonesome, but at least I have plenty of time to rehearse my talent numbers. Sometimes I get in a wheelchair and roll around the warehouse.

Mr. Cecil and I are going down to Gamble’s Department Store as soon as we can and buy me a white evening gown for the pageant and a white bathing suit as well. Everything has to be
white, according to the Miss Mississippi contest rules. Mr. Cecil has been teaching me how to walk because they judge you on your posture. I go around with a book on my head all the time and I am getting pretty good at it

If I can just win that scholarship! You should read who all has studied at the American Academy. I wouldn’t be surprised if Celeste Holm went there. Mr. Cecil and Tootie and Dolores and Helen and I are planning to celebrate Dolores’s birthday at this new Polynesian restaurant that has just opened. Nobody knows how old Dolores is and she won’t tell, claiming it is a state secret. Tootie says she rides buses just so she won’t have to get a driver’s license and reveal her age.

Did you know that they have bedpans made just for men?

We got to the Aloha Restaurant about seven o’clock. It was decorated like Hawaii, with Hawaiian music and waitresses in real Hawaiian costumes. Tootie ordered a whole suckling pig for our party, and we had all kinds of funny drinks. My first one came in a coconut. Then I had one called a Mai Tai, and one called a Scorpion.

We were eating our appetizers, shrimp and chicken livers with bacon, and I was having a wonderful time when all of a sudden Mr. Cecil looked like he had seen a ghost. My back was to the door, and he said, “Don’t turn around.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “Don’t turn around.”

Then Tootie said under her breath, “Don’t turn around.”

So naturally I turned around, and there were Ray Layne and Ann at the door. He saw me at the same time I saw him. I could have crawled under the table. There I sat with four paper umbrellas in my hair and six paper leis around my neck. He came over and said hello and introduced Ann to everyone, including me. I said, “How do you do?” What else would I say?

Helen, who was bombed, said, “Why don’t you two join the party?” Tootie kicked her so hard under the table that she spilled her drink. He didn’t stay and after he left, Mr. Cecil asked me if I wanted to go. I said, no, there was no reason to ruin the party for everybody. Then I had three more coconut drinks. We never did eat that suckling pig. The poor thing died for nothing. Of all the restaurants in the world, why did Ray have to come into that one?

Afterwards we went to Tootie’s apartment. That’s where I got the idea of having Mr. Cecil hide me in the closet. I put on Tootie’s old winter coat with the hanger still in the back of it, and Mr. Cecil lifted me up and hung me in the closet. At the time I thought it would be the funniest thing in the world for them to find me just hanging there with the coats. What I didn’t realize was that Mr. Cecil was so drunk he forgot where he put me. I must have hung in that closet for over an hour before I passed out.

The next morning, when I woke up and saw Tootie’s fox furs, I started kicking and screaming. Dolores got to me first and opened the door. I asked her, “What in the world am I doing hanging in the closet?”

She said, “I’m sure I don’t know.” Nobody had gone home that night, and you never saw so many sick people with hangovers in your life. Those fruit drinks are lethal. I had missed the best part of the evening, though, because Dolores got so drunk she told everybody how old she was, and now they won’t tell me.

We sat around the apartment with ice on our heads until about five o’clock that afternoon. Tootie had to call the drugstore to bring us Alka-Seltzer and aspirin and Coca-Cola and ice cream. I will never do that again as long as I live. Thank God it was Saturday. When I did get home, I stayed in bed all day
Sunday. Lucky for me Jimmy Snow was off crop-dusting. If he had played that television set as loud as he usually does, I might not have survived. I don’t know what hurt worse, seeing Ray or my head.

Daddy had to have the money. I couldn’t let him lose the lease on the bar. He tried to borrow all over town, I know he did, but nobody would give him a penny. He wouldn’t have asked me for it if he hadn’t been desperate. He knew how hard I had been saving.

At first I got mad and didn’t want to give it to him. Then I remembered what he had done for me when I was a kid, how he had taken a chance on going to jail for life to protect me, so I couldn’t let him down.

I am sure he will pay it back. Besides, I can always go in the contest next year or something. A year is nothing.

When Jimmy Snow got home from his crop-dusting job and found out I had given Daddy all my money, he was furious! He screamed, “How in hell could you be so stupid as to give your daddy your money?” and tore into Daddy’s room, where he yanked him out of the bed and called him a no-good drunken son of a bitch. He started beating Daddy up until I ran in and stopped him.

Jimmy stormed back into the other room. He had $40 in his billfold that he kept trying to make me take. I didn’t want his money, all I wanted was for him to stop acting so insane. He asked why would I give Daddy the money when I knew he would just drink it all up. I told him whatever Daddy does, he was still my father and I owed it to him.

He said, “You don’t owe that rotten son of a bitch anything.”

And before I thought, I said, “He killed Claude Pistal, didn’t he?”

That was the first time I had ever broken my word and mentioned it since I was eleven. I was sorry I had.

Jimmy looked at me real strange and said, “What?”

I said, “Listen, Jimmy, let’s just forget about it, OK?”

“Wait a minute. I’m not going to forget it. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I know who killed Claude, so let’s just leave it at that, all right?”

“Who do you think killed him?”

“You and Daddy and Rayette. You told me so yourself.”

He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Oh, my God. You didn’t believe that story I told you about Rayette Walker, did you?”

“Of course I did.”

“Daisy, your daddy and I never killed anybody.” Jimmy looked like he was going to cry.

“Of course you did. I saw the sacks with the guns you got from Peachy Wigham.”

“What guns?”

“The two sacks you got from Peachy the night Claude was killed. I saw Daddy bring the guns back the next day. You can stop pretending.”

“Daisy, there weren’t guns in those sacks. That was two bottles of bootleg whiskey your daddy and I bought off of Peachy and took to Rayette’s house. He brought the empty bottles back in those sacks.”

“Wait a minute. How else would Daddy have known about Claude being dead before the police told him?”

“I went up to the airstrip to get something out of the plane that morning and I found Claude and called your daddy over at Rayette’s house and told him.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But you told me the bullets were from Rayette’s gun.”

“My God, Daisy, I was half drunk that night and your daddy put me up to telling you that story so he could go on seeing Rayette without you having a fit over it. I never thought you believed it.”

I said, “Of course I believed it.”

Then he started to cry and kept repeating how sorry he was, that that stupid story was just a joke. I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. I don’t want to see either one of them again.

I have been living at the YWCA and eating at Morrison’s Cafeteria. After work yesterday, when I walked into the lobby, there sat Jimmy Snow. He grabbed me by the arm and said, “Come on, we are going home.”