Lark and Termite (7 page)

I left the husband after four years. He’d met a nice woman his own age and I gave them my blessing. Bad things had happened to him, and I didn’t want to keep being one of them. He said I’d helped him through a difficult time and he paid a year’s rent on my new apartment. The Depression was over. I left with my clothes and got my old job back at the restaurant. A lot of places folded, but Lowman’s stayed open. War had started in Europe. The city seemed alive again, nervous and edgy; the restaurant was busy and hired more staff. Then Charlie showed up, with Lola outside in his car. She was out of control, he said. I was her sister. What were we going to do? He said it just like that—like we were family. And I knew we were.

Gladdy would have been happy if Charlie had married a nice Catholic girl and moved her in with them to do whatever Gladdy said. Just to spite her, or maybe to spite himself, Charlie didn’t. His heart murmur kept him out of the service, at home with Gladdy and the business. We weren’t in touch, but Lola wrote to me every month, and I answered. When our father died, I sent flowers. Our mother got sick. Lola, the two years after she graduated high school, took care of her alone. I sent money to support them, but I wasn’t going back, not even for the funeral. A few days after, the house burned. People said Lola had thrown a lit match onto the newspapers by the stove, that the house burned so hot she must have poured kerosene from one room to another. She turned up at Charlie’s lunch counter with her suitcase while the sirens were still blaring. Nonie’s left her husband, she told Charlie, and she could take him to me. He asked about the fire and she said it was the only way to burn up the smell of the sickbed, all the beds. Charlie knew he’d better get her out of town while everyone was occupied. Back then, Gladdy actually worked in the restaurant. For once, Charlie told her he had to go. He put Lola in the car and drove, pulling over to sleep when he had to. Lowman’s was a city block, an Atlanta landmark in those days, easy to find, and the restaurant was a third of the first floor. There Charlie was, sitting at a table by the window, where he could see his car and Lola in it.

I’d been a duty-bound insurance executive’s wife, answering expectations and reading
Collier’s
in bed afterward, but I was only twenty-four. Being in the same room as Charlie after so long was like opening a furnace door. I’ll never forget his face and his dark eyes as I walked over to him in my waitress uniform and red chiffon apron. We didn’t know it, but except for the apron and a few major interruptions, we were looking at the rest of our lives. He pulled me against him and held me and we looked into the street at Lola looking back at us, her face framed in the window of Charlie’s black car. She knew she’d accomplished something I never could: him standing there. You don’t need to worry, I told Charlie. She’s got what she wanted and she’s not going anywhere.

My shift ended an hour later and I took them to my apartment. Lola fell asleep on the sofa before I could even get a meal cooked. Charlie and I locked the bedroom against her, but we needn’t have bothered. She slept for three days. Charlie drove me to my Low-man’s shifts and looked for a job, but it was Lola who found him work, as a bouncer at Onslow’s, a club that took her on as a cigarette girl and backup singer. She had sheet music in her suitcase, and a beaded dress like the ones she’d seen in magazines. The Irish mob was big business, and so were the Italians and their gin joints. Billy Onslow was snug with both, and he owned establishments in Atlanta and Louisville. He was a big deal then, a bruiser musician in a sharkskin coat, pulling strings. I later found he dealt in interstate liquor transport and high-class call girls, but at the time I thought, fine, he can play piano for Lola. Soon enough his headliner was hospitalized after her hoodlum boyfriend broke her jaw, and Lola stepped in. She stopped singing backup and rehearsed afternoons like a regular career girl. She loved Atlanta, she bought clothes, she wanted Charlie and me to move to a bigger apartment with her, and I was thinking it over. I’d finish a dinner shift at Lowman’s and get to the club by ten, sitting there in a cream silk sheath dress and pearls while Charlie worked the door. Billy Onslow would come by and sit with me before Lola’s set, always very polite, courtly, like he was making sure the staff knew I was his guest and men knew not to approach me. He was almost thirty years older than Lola, but very different from my middle-aged ex-husband—Billy Onslow had certainly never sold insurance. I tried to give the impression I was watching over Lola. He’d listen, but one night he looked at me dead on. “I don’t usually meddle with the talent,” he told me, “but let’s not kid ourselves about your sister.”

Just then there was some commotion—you could say Onslow’s catered to a flamboyant clientele—and he got up and left. He could have meant any number of things, I told myself. That he was her lover, or had been. Or he was her lover and she had other lovers. Or worse, she was dabbling in entertainments the musicians enjoyed, coke or goofballs or junk. Onslow overlooked recreational use, Charlie had told me, he could hardly prevent it and was known to indulge himself, but he wouldn’t employ anyone who was strung out. Maybe he’d just meant no one could watch over Lola, that the whole idea was ridiculous, that I was ridiculous, a Lowman’s waitress in pearls. Yes, that was it. I was ridiculous.

It was 1941. We’d been living together six months, Lola in her makeshift room, Charlie and me in ours, coming and going together or separately, the little family Lola had finally made. We never referred to Winfield or Gladdy or the restaurant, we were together, and I suddenly wondered why Charlie had never mentioned getting married. Why I’d never mentioned it, why it had never even occurred to me. Why Lola slept so soundly on that couch behind the French screen she’d set up, the closet in the one bedroom overflowing with her dresses and lingerie. She’d bought me a big new bottle of my perfume with her first paycheck because she’d used so much of it. We sat at the same vanity at different times of day, combing our hair, putting on makeup, touching a crystal stopper from the same perfume bottle to our throats and ears and shoulders. Charlie smelled of both of us. So did the sheets of the bed. Here at the club there was a bed in Lola’s dressing room, and a chiffonier and a little sink. Charlie and she shared the same hours, like it was part of Charlie’s job, while at home she was just the little sister.

I sat at the bar, seeing Lola’s younger face in the dark bedroom of our house she’d burned down in Winfield, her eyes as close as the edge of the bed, Charlie actually inside me as we worked our way to the swooning novena we’d perfected. Good, I’d thought then, watch us, I won’t stop, I won’t let you take this from me. I’d closed my eyes against her then, just as I’d closed them now. It was midnight in Atlanta. Billy Onslow stood leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the big room, watching me. I knew he was in it with me, with us. He’d always deferred to me, shown me courtesies: he thought I was respectable and hardworking. He thought the same of himself, strange as that seems, despite his discreet alcoholism and other habits. He’d delivered his news on purpose, to pull me in with him and to change the lay of the cards. Billy was a master at reading everyone’s hand before they could. He knew exactly what I was realizing and how fast it would fall into place, and he waited for me to look at him. I did, and he moved toward me. His wet hazel eyes shone like glass. My dress felt hot against my thighs, and every pearl in the necklace I’d saved so long to buy burned on my neck like a match head. He could feel me in his hands already. He was the one man who ever turned full force from Lola to me, who rejected her when he could have had her. Later, even after I’d left him, he took care of Lola when I couldn’t.

That was a long time ago, when I wore that dress and those pearls.

Billy lived above the club. I went upstairs with him that night. I remember those hours, in rooms full of velvet furniture and racks of the showy costumes his dancers wore, file cabinets and piles of papers, and his bed that was big enough for four people. He was knowledgeable, Billy was, he could be gentle, and he used my feelings to surprise both of us. I didn’t sleep, and the next day, while Lola was at rehearsal, I went back to the apartment and told Charlie to get out. I can’t explain my state of mind. Charlie had been mine from the time I was a child myself. I thought he’d chosen me, was restored to me, but Lola had lit the fire that brought him, and she’d seduced or confused him into staying. He was devastated that I knew what he’d done and couldn’t stop doing, but it was only my knowing that allowed him to end it. I didn’t tell him to leave town. He exiled himself, drove back to Winfield and his whole favored-son routine without even saying good-bye to Lola.

When I take stock now, I think to myself, I have Charlie and Elise and Nick. I couldn’t have cared for these children without their help. It took time to come back to Charlie, but I love him still after thirty years, and I like having my own house, separate from his drama with Gladdy I really seldom think of Lola now. Except for the questions Lark used to ask and stopped asking, it’s over and done, it’s finished. Like Elise says, there’s Lark and there’s Termite. These children have got nothing to do with Lola, except they came through her to get to me. The one has stood on her own two feet since she was barely up to my elbow, and the other is happy with a piece of dry-cleaner bag a yard long and a few inches across.

Termite

He sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again. He breathes, blowing just high. The blue moves but not too much, the blue moves and stays blue and moves. He can see into the sky where there are no shapes. The shapes that move around him are big, colliding and joining and going apart. They’re the warm feel of what he hears and smells next to him, of those who hold and move and touch and lift him, saying these curls get so tangled, wipe off his hands, Lark, there’s Termite. He sings back to keep them away or draw them near. That’s all he’ll say, he won’t tell and tell. Lark bends over him and her hair falls along his neck and shoulders, her hair moves and breathes over his back and chest in a dark curtain that falls and falls. Her hair smells of flowers that have dried, like the handful of rose petals he grasped until they were soft and damp. Lark names the flowers and he says the sounds but the sounds are not the flowers. The flower is the shape so close he sees it still enough to look, blue like that, long and tall, each flared tongue with its own dark eye. Then the shape moves and the flower is too close or too far. The shape becomes its colors but he feels Lark touch it to his face and lips like a weightless velvet scrap. The flower moves and blurs and smears, he looks away to stop it disappearing. Pictures that touch him move and change, they lift and turn, stutter their edges and blur into one another. Their colors fall apart and are never still long enough for him to see, but the pictures inside him hold still. Their gray shades are sharp and clear and let him see, flat as the pages of books Lark holds near his eyes. The books are colors that run and shine but the pictures inside him stay and never blur. They might say one color or two, bright colors that shine in the gray like jewels. He sees them when the sounds of the train or the pounding of rain flies all around him. The pictures move, revealed as though a curtain slowly lifts, moving as Lark’s hair might move, parting and falling away until the picture is still and complete. The pictures tell their story that repeats and repeats again and stays inside him until it ends. He sees them without trying. It’s how Lark sees everything, everywhere they go. She couldn’t walk and run so fast and be so sure through his moving colors, his dark that blurs. But she can’t hear what he hears. He listens hard to tell. She never knows what’s coming but he can’t say and say.

Lark gives him the glass moon man that smells of soap. Inside the hole behind the face there’s a trapped sweet smell no one can wash. Lark’s fingers are long and smooth. They come and go.

Lark says feel your soft blue shirt want to wear this? She says hold the crayon it’s green as grass is green. She says listen to the radio even if it’s not so loud as you like. She says eat your toast while it’s hot and she gives him toast, thick and warm and buttery in his hand with the blue jam on the knife like the farmer’s wife. The knife comes and goes across the plates. The table holds the pouring and crashing and banging while Nonie walks hard and fast in and out of the kitchen in her white shoes. Her legs swish every step and he can feel her stepping room to room to room. No matter where she is he can hear and he puts his head on the table to hear the sound alone through the wood without all the other sounds. But she picks him up, one strong arm around his chest and the other bent for the seat under him she calls his throne. They move fast, thudding across the floor out the door onto the ground where the sound goes hollow and deep.

The porch door bangs.

Sudden morning air floats low to the ground amid the small houses like fragrant evaporating mist, a cool bath of dew and shadow and damp honeysuckle scent. He gasps and hears the sharp grass under them move its fibrous roots. Lark has brought his chair but he leans far back in Nonie’s arms to look and look into the dense white sky. Heat will climb down in wisps and drifts, losing itself in pieces until it falls in gathered folds, pressing and pressing to hold the river still. Far up the heat turns and moves like a big animal trying to rouse. All the while he can hear Elise’s car roll its big wheels closer until it turns roaring into the alley but Nonie puts him in his chair. She brushes his hair back with her two broad hands while the car throbs in the narrow tracks of the alley, crushing gravel to rattles and slides and bleating loud. He calls and calls and he wants to go but Nonie goes. Under the motor sound he hears the car take her weight, a sigh before the door slams. The car roars away down the stones onto the smooth pavement and goes until it’s gone. There’s a shape in the air where the car was. He feels the shape hold still before it begins to end. Slowly the air comes back. The grass begins small sounds.
The ground under the wheels goes hard and soft. Lark pulls him to the trains in the wagon and the rail yard is silent. Each stopped train is a deep still weight. Water trickles in the ditch where the dogs drink. They snap their jaws in the heat and Lark throws stones to make them run. They skim their shadows across weeds and broken pavement, loping the slant to the tipple where they slink and watch. Lark gives him his ribbon to hold. She knows which train will clank and rumble, jerking back before it smashes loud. He blows on the ribbon, moving the blue, and the train begins to move. Lark is quick and strong and she pulls the wagon fast, running beside the roar that clacks and smashes and races smooth. A dark rush spreads and moves and holds them, rattling inside them and tunneling deep, leaving and roaring, pushing them back and back. The boxcars go faster and begin to flash, moving their heavy shapes. The closed doors glint and the open ones are moving holes, dark in the rattling noise. Lark runs closer, harder, and the roar begins to make the shape, long and deep like the roll of the river, shaking round and wide. The picture inside him opens in gray shades, closer and sharper until each still line and curve has its own pale sound and the lines and shapes can turn and move. He lets go of the blue to tell and say and the train takes
and takes it, whistling loud, bleating and disappearing into the trees. The train shrieks and the narrow bitter smoke is a scar that whispers and falls, pouring away across the railroad bridge, over the river and on.

Lark stops running and sits on the ground. She leans against the wagon and her breath moves the wooden slats. He listens until she’s quiet. The hot rails hum and each cinder thrown into the wagon is a small rock spark. The little rocks are warm.

Termite, Lark says. I’ll fix the radio. Don’t worry.

Here’s your ribbon, Lark says.

She wraps the blue around his wrist. He moves it to his face, just above his eyes, but he doesn’t look.

Mow the grass, Lark says. Big storm they talk about.

He waits. Soon she’ll go.

She says, don’t think you’re going to sit out here in the rain with lightning flashing all around you.

He holds still, listening. Far down the alley where the gravel meets the street, he hears the orange cat paw forward on its ragged paws. Away down the alley across from Tuccis’ house the ragged orange cat is stepping careful, dragging its belly along the stones under the lilacs. The cat waits then for Lark to go. The cat waits low and long where no one sees and the growl in its belly thrums deeper. The cat knows Lark will throw a stick or a handful of gravel that lands like stinging rain.

Termite, Lark says.

She puts her face close to his, her eyes against his eyes. Lark’s brown eyes are stirred like the river when the river is milky with rain. She knows he can see if she’s very close but he doesn’t look now, he doesn’t try, he doesn’t want her to stay.

She says, you ring the bell if you want anything.

He wants to hear the train. Far off the train’s bell sound is long and wide and dark as the shade under the railroad bridge. The bridge goes over the river and the trains pour over top. He wants to feel the roar.
Lark and the Tuccis take him through the rail yard on the way to the river, between the Polish boys and the ditch. The
boys have got a snarling something in the ditch with their sticks and Lark says they’re worse than the dogs, cornering one thing or another, beating and hitting until a dog sounds like a cat and a farmer’s wife with a carving knife. Joey and Solly fight the boys and Zeke stays in the wagon. Lark is never scared. Joey and Solly roll in the dirt punching and grunting with the Polish boys from Lumber Street and Zeke throws stones behind.

Zeke, hold Termite tight. Here’s a faster ride.

And they’re riding faster into the cool where the arched tunnel walls are furry. The leaves move up and down the rock and the ivy is shadows on the curve above. No sky it’s a stone sky Termite that’s why it’s gray. Beside them the river is the only sound until Joey and Solly burst out yelling from the bushes.

So you’ve got a bloody lip no call to yell like a banshee. Look Termite, a scrape like a star on his chest. Solly, wash off in the water and cover that up with your shirt. If Noreen sees it she’ll know you’ve been fighting. You cold, Termite? Look, we’ll make a fire on the dirt where no weeds can catch. Zeke, no more telling about fires or fights and you can have marshmallows. We only need some sticks for Joey to sharpen, he loves his knife so much.

Termite, look how the fire leaps up, see how warm?

Doesn’t matter if it rains the river is full of rain. We could ride the river all the way through Winfield past Parkersburg to Sophia and Shady Spring, past Pulaski and Mount Airy. We could ride the train to Charleston straight through to Charlotte and Jacksonville, clear to Florida, Termite, to the ocean. Like our seashells I show you, like that water sound inside them, all spread out for miles, bigger than a country, bigger than the air you watch through your ribbons.
Nonie cuts ribbons from the blue plastic bags that cover her uniforms three at a time. Sometimes her uniforms hang in Elise’s car in the sun and the blue is warm. Nonie works at Charlie’s and she doesn’t go to the river. She says the rail yard is near deserted now and no place for them to be. But there are no boys anymore at the rail yard, no sounds in the ditch, only empty trains passing south and sometimes a man in a boxcar throwing bottles out. Not at you Termite, tramps ride the trains and sometimes they clean house. Lark takes him close to the empty boxcars on the overgrown sidings and lets him touch the hard broad sides of the cars from the wagon. Blocks of silence shift behind the huge doors, trapped inside, too big to turn or rest. The sides of the metal cars are grainy with rust and warm with banked heat even in the morning. Termite feels their low steel drone in his fingertips, a drunken stir like hundreds of stunned insects warmed and beginning to move. But the cars don’t move; they’re hot and cold and day and night and he stays still to hear them. Lark says there were coal cars, long flatbed cars filled at the tipple no one uses anymore, now the mines have closed. The wooden boxcars breathe, she says. They carried animals and have skinny windows too high for cattle and pigs to see out. Loud wind poured through, cooling chickens in cages so small the hens couldn’t move and so they went to sleep. That was a long time ago. Now the boxcars only wait or move empty to bigger towns. The freights pour through without stopping and Lark moves him far back to watch. Once a bottle thrown from a train smashed at his feet, brief as bells in the roar. A mean drunk, Lark said, not like most of them, old men riding and drinking. They don’t bother us, Lark says. It’s the trains that are fierce, rumbling their rattling music to shake the ground, crossing the river and leaving the town, leaving and leaving. At night the long low whistles sound like windy cries, moist with dew and darkness. Nonie doesn’t know, she doesn’t hear. She comes home and takes off her shoes and says she’d give anything.
At the special school the teacher tells him to hold still. She holds his hands tight shut and says to nod his head to the music. The farmer in the dell. She puts the straps around him in the chair with wheels, across his front and his chest.

There. You’re nice and safe and sitting as straight as you can.

The Victrola scratches out the song and the song comes to the end.

There that’s once.

She starts it again. It’s Lark’s song not her song. He moves his wrist
to sound the bell on his chair but there’s no bell and this is not his chair. The bus will come a long time after lunch to take him home. He likes the bus and its big noise even if he’s the only one the driver carries up the steps. The driver belts him into his seat and he can lean his head on the window. Footsteps pound heavy while the other kids climb on and the voices go high and low. The driver starts the engine and says Quiet, quiet now, while the special bus gets quiet. The long low growl of the bus can start then, and the thrum and shaking. The whole floor trembles like an animal under its skin and the sound is warm and deep, pouring into him through the vibrating frame of his seat and the silver rim of the window. The bus stops at railroad crossings and shudders, swings the big doors open on their giant hinges. There’s a whoosh and flap like metal wings slapping out, then in. He sits still to feel it all at once, breathing when the bus breathes. The bus is a long hard shape like the tunnel under the railroad bridge, but the bus is from the school. The bus goes to the school and comes from the school where the woman holds on to his hands.

Did you listen close that time? Now we’re going to clap.

She reaches for him and he pulls away. The lights on the ceiling are tubes that flicker when he blinks. She grabs his hands hard and pulls his face to hers. She smells hard and clean but there’s another smell, small and curled and crumbling in her mouth where her words come out.

I’m here in front of you, see? Look at me. People? I need an aide. You, please assist. Stand behind him and keep his head stationary. Both hands. Gentle but firm.

The music goes again and the hands beside his eyes are fat and damp, his head held fast in the cleft of a pillowy white chest. He can’t move and his breath gets fast and hard. He reaches, trying to go, his fingers going fast. The teacher holds his arms and jerks them once twice three times and smashes his hands together. The sound stings and cuts and she grasps him hard, counting. His fingers race and his heart pounds and he hears the dull alarmed thud of a heartbeat in the back of his head. A sound keens out of him, a sound to push her
back, and he goes into the sound. Then there are cold cloths on his head and his stinging wrists and his chair is pushed to the window. The needle of the Victrola bumps and bumps in air.