Every now and then a trucker would sit in the diner and boast of busting up a faggot goodbuddy.
They didn’t notice how the room went quiet. I heard it said that one northerner sat there laughing, wearing one of Glad’s boy’s raccoon bones around his own neck. He didn’t look up from his medallions of chicken fried Ahi when the boy came in—face bruised and misshapen like a sat-on plum, Glad at his side. The boy nodded in the Yankee’s direction. Glad sent the boy into the arms of Mother Shapiro, the den mama, to one of his caravans he kept for the boys with no homes of their own.
I heard that the noise got louder as everyone made a show of acting real regular so they could claim themselves so engrossed in the conversations going on, they never noticed anything foul afoot.
But everyone heard the song. It has its place in the middle of the jukebox, an inconspicuous number as any: 24B. The A side is worn out skipping ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.’
Everyone made a show of not watching Glad walk real slow, through the swing doors and into the kitchen. Via the open order station window, everyone pretended not to be looking at Glad taking off the leather thong around his neck and removing one of two identical leather pouches he wore next to the hugest raccoon penis bone anyone had ever seen. Bolly Boy stopped checking on his tuna-noodle soufflé and took the pouch from Glad. It was well known Bolly had once been one of Glad’s boys, but retired when he fell in love with a john that drove a custom. He swore he’d be true, but he was so used to giving pleasure to all the truckers he was sure his pledge would be in vain. But Glad fixed him with a job as a chef and paid for chef lessons, so Bolly Boy could stay chaste and still deliver pleasure, which made everyone happy. Bolly’s sous-chef, Paxton Maculvy, was another one of Glad’s who retired when he fell in love with the faces the drivers made when consuming the creations Bolly made. ‘No trick ever rolled his eyes to heaven like that when eating me,’ Paxton sighed. So Glad sent him to chef school, but on account of Paxton being illiterate, he dropped out and studied with Bolly in the truck-stop kitchen instead.
The Yankee never noticed the corners of all the truckers’ eyes following Paxton as he strode over to the jukebox and used a special key to open the box up. If Bolly hadn’t been such a great chef, the northerner might’ve had a chance to take a break from his side dish of liver with crème fraîche strudel. He could’ve taken note of the subtle hush in the diner as Paxton fingered his coon penis bone with one hand while pressing the buttons to put song 24B on for ten continuous plays. If Bolly had been less of a chef, the Yank might’ve done more than just hum along unconsciously to the old TV song theme blasting from the juke. He could’ve recognized that, like an Indian war whoop warning before the attack, the
Davy Crockett
song was being played. If the calf liver reduction sauce on the fresh corn ragout had been a little off, he might’ve got the mental picture every trucker had in the diner. Davy Crockett in his raccoon hat. He might’ve lit a wet rag out of that diner and escaped with his life.
The place almost jumped when Bolly himself, with his raccoon prick hanging almost in the Yankee’s face, bent over to set down with a thud a pecan flambé and lit it up with a flash at the man’s table. Before the Yank could protest that he had ordered no such thing, Bolly whispered in his soft voice, ‘This, sir, is on the house.’
The Yank never would’ve thought that was the last conversation he would ever have in this world. Everyone’s eyes were pretending not to be on the flambé, so the steaming brown coffee mug Bolly casually placed next to the pie was paid no mind. And only the folks that knew what was in Glad’s leather pouches knew that it was the steaming brown mug that would do the Yank in and not Bolly’s work of art pecan soufflé. Though again, if Bolly had been less of a chef and the soufflé not as dense, yet airy and so sweet you couldn’t help but roll your eyes to heaven and give a praise of thanks, well, the Yank could’ve had a chance to notice that the coffee had a distinctly strange flavor to it. If he had been a local he might have recognized that he was sipping on a coffee substitute made from the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree used by poor miners. If he had been a botanist he might have known that unless those seeds and leaves are roasted to a crisp brown, they are as poisonous as a deep mine with a broken vent. The Yank had to sip his coffee against the richness of Bolly’s dessert. Somewhat immediately he started to get a stomach cramp, but there were still pecans, shiny in their sugar web, to be fished out of the white goblet, so he ate greedily through the discomfort.
The talk got extra loud as the truck driver from up north wearing a stolen love bone too tight around his neck paid his check and left for his truck. Everyone noted, as they watched him climb into his cab, that the man was bowed over some, rubbing his stomach as if it were a genie lamp.
The Department of Health and the sheriff made a visit to the diner not long after they found the northerner’s stiff body curled up in a fetal position in the back of his vomit-festooned cab. He was pulled off to the side of the Interstate for a day and night before the highway patrol found him. It was the raccoon prick bone around his neck that brought the sheriff in and the crumpled napkins saying The Doves Diner that brought in the Health Department.
The sheriff nodded as he spoke to one of Glad’s boys that wore no bone. The boy, through spit-wet eyes, told him a tale of love and a gift he had made to the Yankee. The Health Department collected mouse droppings and Roach Motels so full they could be used as maracas. The sheriff tried to comfort the boy and handed him back his bone. The Department of Health shut the diner for seventy-two hours and gave it a several-hundred-dollar fine. No one ever noticed it was Glad who paid the fine. And no one ever said a word about the known fact that Bolly’s kitchen was kept so clean that when he invited many a trucker to eat off of his floor, many took him up on it.
Nobody ever said a word about it. Except in hushed tones of gossip you could overhear if you had good hearing.
I subtly finish dabbing up the Kentucky coffeetree droplets off my cheeks. I knew Glad had never hurt one of his boys, even when he had reason to. But I couldn’t for the life of me tell the difference between the two pouches around his neck. What if he made a mistake and didn’t notice he had Bolly make his mug from the pouch that held the unroasted seeds and leaves?
‘You live with family? In the Hurley motel, don’t you?’ Glad asks, blowing in his mug and accidentally spraying me again.
‘Yes, sir.’ I nod and pat my face with a napkin. I’m not sure what Sarah is supposed to be to me so that’s all I say and Glad says nothing more on it either.
‘I’ve seen her working the lots. Pretty lady. I’m sure she does well.’ Glad nods and I nod. ‘Girls, ‘specially pretty blonde young girls, can do themselves quite a turn.’
I look down at my bone again. I hope everyone saw him putting it on me. I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say I heard a dip in the volume when he did—not as much as when Glad murdered the Yankee, but along those lines somewhat.
‘I heard it said you look fetching in a leather miniskirt yourself,’ Glad says.
Sarah used to dress me up herself. She would do my makeup. I loved watching her lick her finger and run it gently under my eyes. It always reminded me of those nature films of a mother bird regurgitating food into its baby’s mouth and left me feeling as full as if she had. When we’d go shoplifting, it was better for me to be a girl, even if I couldn’t be as pretty as her.
‘Girls have more cubbyholes to hide things in,’ she’d say, shoving cigarette packs down my dress and into my empty bra and cold wet chopped meat into my panties. ‘Men only want to stuff those with themselves—they don’t ever see what we hid in ’em!’ She’d laugh at the guards staring at our legs and I laughed with pleasure at being included in her ‘we.’ But she’d stopped dressing me even though it’s easier to make your way in the world as two girls. Easier when you’re sitting at a diner, loudly fretting over only having enough for a Jell-0 salad when a baconburger would go down real nice, to get a man to lean down over you and say, ‘Let me take care of this, little darling.’ Easier to get invited to stay the night at a man’s place instead of sleeping in the car. Most anything you want in this world is easier when you’re a pretty girl. She stopped letting me dress when it got too easy for those men to crawl from her bed into mine.
But I didn’t stop. Sometimes I would put bows and sparkle gel in my curly shoulder-length hair until it shimmered, just like Sarah’s. Now and then, when I knew she had gone with a trick to gamble out on a delta boat, I would wander the tic-tac-toe-like board lines between the trucks and act like a new girl, a new dress for sale, out on the stroll. I kept to the dark and ran if a john or another lizard called to me. I showed enough to make them interested in who this mysterious girl could be. I thought no one ever saw me enough to know it was me. I convinced myself I was like a comic book hero, hiding in the shadows, my magic stiletto heels clicking away all evil. I watched the lizards climb in the trucks and I giggled to myself as the cab suddenly started a-rockin’ and a-rollin’ till the lizard would just as abruptly leap from the truck stuffing dollars in her boot. I only got whipped once for using Sarah’s things and that was ’cause I was sloppy and she found me out. I had stepped in a deep puddle, and because I had stuffed newsprint in her shoes so I could walk in them, I lost my balance and fell. I broke her heel and put a bad stain and tear in the fine leather of her skirt I had paper-clipped high around me. I tried to get it fixed, but she noticed right off. Before that no one had ever told on me. But folks knew. Glad tells me how much the men are all of fond of seeing me dash under the lamplight like a forest sprite. Even the girls think it’s sweet, and that I would make an excellent lizard for real. That was what had brought me to his attention.
‘Those divine golden curls of yours are very much admired,’ Glad says, with a raise of his eyebrows and a sweet bowing of his head; asking my permission to touch them.
I lean forward and tilt my head like a cat under his caress. ‘Soft as pig belly.’ I almost fall flat on the table pressing my head into his hands.
‘You’ll be my guest when you dine here, so maybe you can fleshen up some. Our customers tend to like a little meat on their girls.’
I thought of Sarah saying, ‘I told you so!’ So I say to Glad, ‘I could be a boy too. I know what to do.’
‘Lots of boys want to work for me.’ Glad takes my hand and genteelly holds it. ‘What a man looks for in a boy is a lot different than what he looks for in my boy-girls.’ He flips his long braid past his shoulders. I squint at him to try and see the Indian in him. He always spoke about being Indian, but aside from his long black braid and his facial spots, I can’t see it.
I heard it said that his hair isn’t really black anyway. It’s just hair-care-product black. His eyes are too blue, even though he tries to downplay it with his heavy lids, keeping them half closed. His nose is flat, more like an Irishman’s then like an Indian. But the story is, his great-grandmother or maybe it was his great-great- or great-great-great-grandmother was a Mississippi Choctaw. No one knew which, not even Glad himself. Mother Shapiro was the only one that had seen the truth of it. She is the oldest and wisest lot lizard at any truck stop in any state, and it is widely known that the sheriff visited her trailer every now and then. She was a long time ago from the North, but no one holds it against her. She likes Sarah. I’d often see Sarah and her cuddled up in one of The Doves’ booths. Sarah would lean in against Mother Shapiro’s Hawaiian Muu-muu-covered mounds of flesh and eat banana crème brulée while Mother Shapiro stroked her hair curls.
‘His name is Glading Grateful ETC… The ETC is in capitals with three dots after the ETC sitting there like a trail into the sunset,’ Mother Shapiro had told Sarah as they sat in Mother’s round bed snuggled under goose-down blankets from Hungary. Sarah told me all about it. And I knew she was trying to make me jealous, so I pretended not to listen and kept saying, ‘What? What?’ until Sarah did stop and I had to beg her to tell me what Mother told her.
‘Mother Shapiro saw an authentic copy of Glad’s driver’s license,’ Sarah finally continued. ‘The Sheriff showed it to her because he couldn’t believe anyone would put ETC and three dots in a name just because he don’t know how far back the first Glad was.’ Sarah loves to tell gossip when she is drunk. Even if she had sworn to hate me forever, if she found out any information about anyone at one of the bars she always stopped at after she was through for the night, she would talk to me. I watch all the gossip shows to arm myself with material.
Sarah was on the bed, her head between her spread-out legs to keep from puking. But it didn’t keep her from telling me what she’d learned from a night with Mother about Glad’s Great-Grandmother ETC…
‘A missionary devoted his life to taking her from a Choctaw to a Christian. He gave her lessons on how she could put Christ’s joy and love into her heart.’ Sarah rolled her head up and down in a little vibrating laugh and I knew it was a move she copied from Mother Shapiro. ‘So he went about gladdening her and making her grateful and…’ She laughed and let her whole body shake as if she were round and undulating like Mother. ‘Glading Grateful the First was born some nine months later.’
I moved myself slowly till my side was next to Sarah’s arm and I cautiously let my head rest on her shoulder. We sat there in the dark of the room, occasionally lit up too bright by the glare of a truck heading out. I slid my feet under the nubbly bedcover, slowly like a crab under sand, to be next to hers. And we stayed like that until we both were asleep.
‘Well, I would like very much to have my own skirt of leather and my own makeup bag that closes with Velcro,’ I say to Glad.
‘I can get you a big sight more than that,’ he says and thumps the table.
We start my training right away in the caravans back behind The Doves. I try to tell Glad I know what to do, that I’ve been with enough of Sarah’s boyfriends and husbands, that if they had paid me I could buy a gator farm. Glad tells me I have to unlearn bad habits learned by watching drunken whores, no disrespect intended.