“Marietta, you're in a state for nothin'.”
The telephone rang and Marietta picked up the receiver.
“Yes?”
As soon as Marietta heard who it was she sat up straighter in her chair and her face lost most of its wrinkles.
“Why, Marcello, what a surprise. Uh huh, I think so. I certainly don't see why not. Around twelve-thirty would be fine. I'm already lookin' forward to it. Thank you for thinkin' of me. Oh, you're awful sweet. Bye, now.”
Marietta hung up.
“Don't tell me that old gangster Crazy Eyes Santos is comin' here?” said Dalceda.
Marietta nodded. “Tomorrow afternoon, for my birthday. He remembered.”
“I just don't plain believe this!” Dal said, setting down her glass on the table. “I thought he'd done a fade after Clyde died.”
“He did. I guess he's just sentimental now we're gettin' older.”
“Man's a killer, Marietta. He's been runnin' the rackets down here since we was girls together at Miss Cook's in Beaufort. He's married, too, of course. And besides, Johnnie Farragut's comin' tomorrow, ain't he?”
Marietta relaxed, sinking down in her chair and closing her eyes.
“Won't matter.”
“The hell it won't. I wouldn't miss this party for the world.”
“One thing about the rest of the world, Dal, they don't give a fig about us and they never have. That's why we got to stick together.”
MARIETTA'S PARTY
Saturday morning it rained. By noon the rain had mostly stopped but the sky stayed grainy and the air was unseasonably cold. Marietta hated birthdays, especially her own. She'd learned, however, that there was no use denying them, so now she accepted the attention at these little gatherings if only for her grandson's sake. Like most children, Pace just loved birthday parties, and since Lula kept him and events under control, Marietta more or less sat back and endured the goings-on in relatively good humor.
As expected, Pace and Lula were the first to arrive.
“Happy birthday, Marietta!” Pace shouted, as soon as the door opened.
He gave her a hug and Marietta offered him her right cheek to kiss, which he did, and not ungladly, as he sincerely liked his grandmother, the only one he had.
“That's one of the nicest improvements about this boy, Lula, that he don't call me âGrandmama' any more.”
“Why's that, Mama? I thought you liked bein' considered old and put to pasture.”
Lula kissed Marietta on the other cheek and handed her a small package wrapped in red and green Christmas paper.
“Sorry about the inappropriate wrappin's,” she said, “but it's all I had. Got ten rolls of it for a dollar at the 7-11, left over from last year. Tell me, you want any.”
“Open it now, Marietta!” Pace said. “Before anybody else gets here.”
“All right, Pace, I'll just do that.”
Marietta carefully unwrapped the gift, handing Lula the ribbon and paper to discard.
“Well, my goodness,” Marietta said, holding up a matching teacup and saucer. “This is a lovely surprise.”
“It's real old, GrandmamaâMarietta, I mean. Mama found it in a junk shop.”
“Lady said it's two hundred years old, Mama, but it's real pretty, I think.”
“Certainly it is. Just look at the gold edges. It's fine China, I can tell. I hope you didn't spend too much on this, Lula. I hear 7-11 wages ain't all that generous.”
“Enjoy it, Mama. I'll go see about the cake.”
The doorbell rang and Pace said, “I'll get it!”
“Why, hello, honey,” Dal said, coming in. “Don't you look handsome today.”
“Mama scrubbed me brand clean, Auntie Dal. She says it makes a difference.”
Dal laughed. “It can indeed. Hello, Marietta,” she said, giving her a hug. “I won't say happy birthday because of your complex.”
“What's a complex?” asked Pace.
“A foolishness that's recognized for what it is,” said Dal.
“Mama says I'm foolish lots of times.”
“That's different, dear,” Dal said, “everyone is. You ain't old enough for the other thing yet.”
“I ain't old enough for much. When'll I be old enough for a complex?”
“For some it's all too soon and never too late.”
“Dal, hush,” said Marietta. “Leave the boy be. Pace, you go on in the back, see you can help your mama with things.”
Pace walked toward the kitchen and the doorbell rang again. Dal opened the door.
“Afternoon, Dalceda. Am I early or late?”
It was Johnnie Farragut, the private investigator from Charlotte who'd been sweet on Marietta for thirty years.
“You're plumb on time, Johnnie,” said Dal. “Marietta's right here.”
Johnnie gave Marietta a kiss on the cheek and handed her an envelope.
“Marietta, I ain't much of a shopper, as you know,” he said, “but this is a certificate for a subscription to a ladies' magazine I thought you might like to look at while your hair's dryin' or somethin'.”
Marietta opened the envelope, took out the certificate and read it.
“
Spiffy
, âThe Magazine for the New Woman.' ”
Dal giggled. “See, Marietta, it ain't for
old
women.”
“Sounds like the name of a peanut butter,” said Lula, coming up to Johnnie and kissing him. “That's so sweet of you, Johnnie. I'm sure Mama'll love readin' it.”
“Sure I will,” said Marietta, taking one of Johnnie's hands. “It's real thoughtful.”
“Prob'ly be a few weeks before the first issue arrives,” Johnnie said.
“That won't bother Mama. You're familiar with her gift for patience.”
There was a knock on the door and Lula opened it. A short, wide, impeccably dressed man who looked to be about sixty, wearing a black toupee and yellow-framed sunglasses, stood in the doorway holding a large box with both hands. Lula noticed that his left thumb was missing.
“This is the home of Marietta Pace Fortune,” he said. It was not a question.
“Yes,” said Lula. “Won't you come in?”
The man entered, saw Marietta and went to her.
“Marietta,” he said, balancing the box on one knee and bending forward to take in his own and kiss the hand she'd just held Johnnie's in, “you're still a gorgeous woman. Your Clyde,
era nato colla camicia.
He was born lucky to have had you for a wife. But now, of course, he is dead and we are living.”
“Clyde been gone a whole lotta years, Marcello,” said Marietta. “Why don't you set down that box?”
“Thank you,” he said, putting the box on the floor.
Pace came running up.
“Can I open it, GrandâMarietta?”
“In a moment, perhaps,” said Marietta. “Marcello, this is my daughter's boy, Pace Roscoe Ripley. And this here's his mama, my precious Lula. This is my oldest and dearest friend, Dalceda Delahoussaye, whom you might remember. And here's Johnnie Farragut, who's in law enforcement over in Charlotte, an old pal of Clyde's. Everyone, this is Mr. Santos.”
Santos nodded and smiled at all of them without removing his dark glasses.
“Mr. Santos?” said Pace.
Santos turned to him, smiling.
“Yes, boy?”
“What happened to your thumb?”
Lula almost said something but held her tongue. She wanted to know what had happened to it, too. Marietta, she figured, already knew.
“You really want to know, hey, boy?” said Santos.
Pace looked up at Santos's large, flat red nose and blue lips and nodded.
“Marcello, you don't have to,” Marietta said.
He held up the four digits remaining on his left hand.
“When I was only a few years older than you are now,” Santos said to Pace, “I worked in a slaughterhouse, where animals are killed and carved up and their body parts packaged to be sold in stores to be eaten. An older man attacked me because he did not like some things I had said about his work. I had said that he was lazy and a bad worker because he was drunk much of the time, and because of this the rest of us in the slaughterhouse had to work even harder at what already was hard work. The man became enraged and with a hatchet crusted with blood from the animals tried to chop off my left hand. Before he could do it I pulled my hand back and all he got was the thumb.”
“I bet you were real angry at him,” said Pace.
Santos nodded. “Yes, I was. I was so angry, that even though this man was older and bigger and stronger than I was, I took the hatchet away from him with my other hand and hit him with it between his eyes.”
“With the blade part?” asked Pace.
“Yes, boy, with the blade.”
“Did you kill him?”
“He died,” said Santos. “It was his own foolishness that killed him.”
“Oh, I know about that,” Pace said. “He musta had a complex.”
Dal laughed and then quickly covered her mouth with her hands.
“Marietta,” Santos said, “I regret that I am unable to stay longer, but there are people waiting for me. I will call you soon, if I may.”
“Please do, Marcello,” she said. “And thanks so much for my present.” Santos smiled. “The present, yes. Well, it's a little something.”
He turned to the others.
“It's been a pleasure,” he said, and went out.
All of the adults gathered in the doorway and watched Santos climb into the backseat of a black Mercedes-Benz limousine and be driven off.
“Look, Marietta, look!” Pace shouted.
Everyone turned from the door and looked at Pace. He had opened the box Santos had brought and was holding up a huge purple silk robe with black velvet lapels.
“There's writin' on it,” said Pace, showing them.
Across the back of the robe in bright gold capital letters were the words SANTOS BOXING CLUB, and underneath, in slightly smaller, silver letters, it said, BILOXI & N.O.
“Can I put it on, Marietta? Can I?” Pace asked.
“Yes, child, put it on.”
“What a strange man,” said Lula.
“Everybody got their way,” said Marietta.
“Santos is someone used to gettin'
his
way most all the time, is my guess,” said Dal.
“So that was Crazy Eyes Santos himself,” said Johnnie.
“Well, come on now, Lula,” said Marietta, “this is my birthday party. Let's get these folks some cake!”
THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY REVISITED
All of the urinals were occupied, so Sailor Ripley used one of the stall toilets to relieve himself. As he did, he read the graffito someone had scrawled with a black felt-tipped pen on the wall container of Protecto toilet seat covers: IRANIAN DINNER JACKETS. Sailor snickered, zipped his jeans, picked up his suitcase and went back out into the Greyhound terminal. His bus to New Orleans was not scheduled to depart for another hour, so he bought a Jackson
Clarion-Ledger
from a vending box and sat down to read it on one of the hardwood benches.
ATLANTA'S BLACK MAYOR VISITS âREDNECK BAR' caught his eye right away. The mayor of Atlanta, seeking white votes in his effort to become Georgia's first black governor, had gone to a Cobb County bar and defended the owner's right to put racist records on the jukebox. The candidate said, “I'll go anywhere to talk to anybody about the future of Georgia,” and had brought with him a couple of records to give the owner, one by Ray Charles and one by Hank Williams, Jr. The bar owner told reporters that to avoid embarrassing the mayor he had removed two records from the jukebox: “Alabama Nigger” and “She Ran Off With A Nigger.” He intended to put them back, he said, after the visit.
“Life don't get no less stupefyin', that's certain,” Sailor whispered to himself, and turned the page.
Sailor had been working as a truck loader in a lumberyard out toward Petal, Mississippi, “The Checkers Capital of America,” for six months, living alone in a crummy transient hotel in Hattiesburg, drinking too much, and thinking hard about Lula and their son, Pace. He hadn't known how awful it would be not to see them at all, especially Pace. During the almost ten years he'd spent in prison on the armed robbery conviction he'd kept alive the idea that when he got out they'd all be together and life could continue from there. Once he'd seen Pace and Lula, however, he'd panicked and run. The time since then had been hell for him. Sailor hated his life in Hattiesburg, where he'd gone for no reason other than he'd once heard a fellow inmate talk about how beautiful Hattiesburg was in the spring when the magnolias blossomed. The
magnolias blossomed all right, but their beauty did not improve Sailor's mood. He needed a change, and New Orleans, where he and Lula had been happy for a few days a decade ago, was an easy target.
Sailor was thirty-two and a half years old, but he felt a lot older. The hard time in Huntsville had changed him, he knew that. Very little that he observed about the workings of the world made sense. Without the hope of ever again seeing the only two people he cared anything about, there didn't seem much point to life.
His
life, anyway. The hour passed and Sailor rose when he heard the passenger page for the bus to New Orleans.
He stowed his suitcase in the overhead rack and took a seat next to a window. Just as the bus turned down the street toward Interstate 59, Sailor saw a woman get out of a new blue BMW convertible, a cigarette stuck between her teeth, and toss her long black hair back over the collar of her suede jacket. Perdita Durango looked the same as she had ten years earlier, Sailor thought, when she'd dropped off him and her boyfriend Bobby Peru in front of the Ramos Feed Store in Iraaq, Texas. Five minutes later Bobby was dead, Sailor was caught red-handed and Perdita was to hell and gone in the getaway car. Suddenly life seemed a whole lot shorter to Sailor than it had the moment before.