Shaking the Sugar Tree (7 page)

Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge

And now Billy Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

I made toast, fixed a cup of coffee, stood at the window looking outside at Jackson Street as Tupelo got ready to face another day of heat and humidity. I thought about the impossibility of knowing what was in peoples’ hearts, of ever really knowing what they thought, or what they wanted, or why they did what they did.

Noah came to the table. He hadn’t dressed and had ugly bruises on his forehead. He sat down without checking in with me, which was not a good sign. The bones on his ribcage were clearly outlined, as if I was starving him to death.

I went to him, looked at the bruises. He winced when I pushed on one of them too hard.

Are you hungry?
I asked.

He shrugged.

I made toast, lathered it with grape jelly, grabbed a strawberry yogurt from the fridge, set them before him with a glass of juice.

He looked at it with disinterest.

Are you okay?
I asked.

He shrugged.

I have to get ready for work,
I said.
Eat your food. Get dressed.

He took his eyes away, ending the conversation.

I stood behind his chair, put an arm across his chest, bent to kiss his hair. He put his hands over my arms, letting his head lean back against me. Checking in at last. Touching me to make sure I was real, that I was still there, that everything was all right.

I crouched down next to him, looking at him carefully.

Why, Daddy?
he asked.

I don’t know.

Why does she hate me?

She’s confused.

He lowered his eyes, bit his lip. Then he sighed, picked up a piece of toast, and began to eat.

I showered, dressed in my FoodWorld uniform, and soon we were out the door and walking down the street hand in hand to Mrs. Humphries’s house a block down.

An old black woman now retired from FoodWorld, Mrs. Humphries was helping to raise her deaf granddaughter, Keke, who was Noah’s best friend. Keke’s mother Tonya had gotten one of the coveted jobs at the new Toyota plant in Blue Springs working the night shift.

Keke saw us coming and hurried down from the porch.

Hi, Mr. C!

“Hi, Keke,” I said.

She took Noah’s hand and led him inside, anxious to get underway with the day’s activities. With Keke, there was no telling what it might be. Last time they had made little concrete bricks with their handprints. One day had been devoted to a formal dinner inside Keke’s large doll house.

Mrs. Humphries sat on the porch with her suitor, Mr. Eddie.

“Good morning, Mrs. H., Eddie,” I said.

“Morning, Wiley,” Mrs. Humphries said. “I don’t like that look on your face. Did you take that boy to see his mama?”

I nodded.

“Was it ugly?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, don’t you worry. The Lord gon’ make a way in his own good time.”

“I sure wish he would make a way for me,” Eddie said, leering at her just slightly.

“You shut up,” she said in a friendly voice.

“Hear the way she sass me?” Eddie said. “If we was married, I’d be taking you across my knee!”

Mrs. Humphries laughed at this ridiculous image.

“Don’t take no nonsense off him, Mrs. H.,” I said.

“You know me,” she replied. “I’ll throw him off this porch if he don’t do right.”

“How’s Miss Tonya?” I asked, referring to her daughter.

“Oh, they work her like a dog, but it’s good pay. She stopped at the store to get some food for the kids. Ought to be home shortly.”

“I’m off at two,” I said.

“You have a good day, Wiley.”

“Y’all be good,” I said.

W
ORKING
THE
express lane, wearing my FoodWorld T-shirt and name badge, I tried not to think about Kayla. Trying, of course, is not the same as succeeding.

A little old lady approached with a cart positively stuffed with way more than fifteen items, distracting me from my grim thoughts. I went around the counter and helped her unload her purchases onto my conveyor belt.

“I think I might have more than fifteen items,” she said with a girlish,
oh dear me
smile.

“You’re being a very naughty girl, aren’t you, darling?” I asked. “I may have to call security and have you arrested.”

She laughed.

“Did you bring your FoodWorld card?” I asked.

“I never leave home without it,” she said proudly.

“Well, let’s get you sorted out,” I said, taking her card and returning to my side of the register.

This particular lady was rather evil, always complained it was too cold, and always made a fuss about payment, which was invariably a check that required two minutes to extract from the depths of her humongous purse.

It all screamed: I want attention!

“How you doing today?” I asked as I ran her purchases through the scanner.

“It’s so cold in here,” she complained. “Especially on that frozen food aisle. I didn’t think to bring my coat.”

“Did you find everything you need?”

“And more. I always do.”

“I do the same,” I agreed.

Any idiot can run items through a scanner, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons they hired me.

“That will be forty-six dollars and thirty cents,” I said after I’d scanned her items.

She arched her eyebrows and made a face, like it was my fault that food was so dear.

“I feel your pain, darling,” I said. “They ought to line up all these food manufacturers against the wall and shoot the whole lot of them, don’t you think? Just machine gun all of them. Just blow them all away.”

“Oh, goodness no, Wiley!”

She laughed nervously, as many of my customers do when they’re trying to figure out whether I’m serious or just kidding.

“I think we should have a free food day,” I said while she dug around in her cavernous purse looking for her checkbook. “Just pick a day, and anything you can put in your cart is free. I think it would be awesome.”

“Oh, my, wouldn’t it be?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t say that too loudly or my boss will hear me,” I added.

“They should put you in charge,” she said.

“I’d have to wear a tie and cut my hair, and we both know that’s not going to happen, don’t we, darling?”

She laughed.

“Hey, boo,” Jalisa said, walking by the express lane. She was a young black girl with tattoos up and down her right arm who spoke rather like a man, and acted like one, too.

“Hey, Jalisa,” I replied. “You doing all right?”

“I’m having a blessed day,” she said.

She took up roost at the next checkout lane over from me, punching in her sign-on numbers like a pro.

While the old lady scratched out her check in surprisingly lucid handwriting, my line grew deeper and I sighed rather too heavily.

“Bad weather’s moving in,” the old bird said, finally handing me a check. “Never seen so many tornadoes in my life.”

“We don’t need no more of those,” I agreed. “Last time one went through, the wind blew so hard I had to have my butt cheeks sewn back together.”

“Oh, Wiley!” she exclaimed, a flush of red stealing across her face.

During this time, a very large woman went over to the change machine bearing a huge jar of coins in her fat arms. She proceeded to dump the change in the metal bowl and they began to clack, one by one, as their total was rung up automatically. The change machine was just opposite the express lane and a good deal of my day was spent listening to that horrid clacking, which grated my nerves. It was like having to listen to pop music all day.

“You have a good day,” I said to the old lady when I was finally able to tear off her receipt from the printer and hand it to her.

“I will,” she said.

“Would you like one of the guys to go out with you to the car?”

“I think I can manage,” she said primly.

T
HAT
EVENING
at dinner I eyed my phone as if my staring would make it ring.

It did not.

Jackson Ledbetter could have his pick of boyfriends in a swampy town like Tupelo. If he could find any. Mississippi gays knew how to blend into the scenery. And although Tupelo has a population of about forty thousand, “the gays” are hard to come by.

Charlie Pride explained on the radio that no one knows what goes on “Behind Closed Doors.” Then the Bellamy Brothers asked the eternal question:
“If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?”

Jackson had a beautiful body. Just the thought made me a bit horny and I nursed my cup of coffee as if it were a cold shower. Boy, I could shake that sugar tree.

I glanced at my clunker of a laptop, which was on the counter, closed, as it had been for many days now. My latest novel was about a haunted house.

When I sold
Dead Man’s Lake
and received a five thousand dollar advance, I had easily imagined myself living the life of the writer, zipping off novels in between visits to museums and book signings and glamorous world travel. It happened right at the time that Noah was born and I found it all too easy to drop out of college so that I could be free to pursue the life of a writer while taking care of him and his many needs.

What a fool I was.

I quickly learned one of the cardinal rules of publishing, which is that you are only as good as your last book. While
Dead Man’s Lake
sold well, the next two did not, and the last stunk up the room. My most recent royalty report showed just two hundred and twelve copies sold during the previous quarter, and that was for all my books combined. The accompanying royalty check was in the lower triple digits, boy howdy do.

As my agent pointed out, most people have a good novel inside them. But not always two or three. Had I not, she wondered, soured on the horror genre? Should I not consider another genre? What was the story that I really wanted to write, the story I really wanted to tell?

I knew the answer she was fishing for: The story of Noah.

Self-confession is good for the soul, they say. When celebs get their tits out, they get six-figure advances. I might at least work myself up into the five-digit range again, like a real writer.

But I couldn’t write about Noah. I couldn’t use him to help a stalled career. Something in me said no.

My agent, Jean, had been noncommittal on the haunted house idea.

“What’s different about it?” she demanded. “Stephen King did the whole thing to death in
Rose Red
, and dreadfully, I might add. What could you possibly add?”

“My house is actually a vampire,” I said.

“Weak,” she offered. “Houses can’t be vampires.”

“This one could be,” I said.

“Have you thought about a book about Noah?”

“No.”

“Please think about it, Wiley. You do want to sell books, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to write a book about him.”

“Think about it, Wiley. Gay man. Single dad. Raising a deaf child with birth defects. Your personal story. What happened. In the South, no less. A meth baby, for crying out loud. Christ, it will sell, believe me. Gay is big right now. Everything is gay gay gay. People want to know. More than that, they want to know something real. And you’ve got all those lovely photos of him. He’s a beautiful child, Wiley. Put one of those on the cover and it’s a guaranteed success. People like cute kids. What’s wrong with telling his story?”

How to explain it to her?

Anyway, I had gotten about ten thousand words into my haunted house novel before I’d petered out and lost interest. Fact was, the idea bored me to tears.
Vampire house eats unsuspecting family
. Oh, who cares? They probably deserved it.

The reviews on Amazon.com for my last novel,
December Falling Down,
had been brutal.

The one by redseven45 proclaimed for all the world to see: “Wiley Cantrell is no Stephen King. He’s the opposite of Stephen King. He’s the Pee Wee Herman of Horror. He’s the Mighty Midget of Terror. His writing is about as scary as a badly written manual on how to put together a piece of occasional furniture. I feel like I wasted my money. That’s not a good feeling.”

The professional reviews were no better. My favorite was the
Kansas City Star
, which said:

“Wiley Cantrell has shown us he can write a hell of a novel. Now he’s shown us that he can’t.”

Was that the truth of things, that I could no longer write a decent novel?

I picked at my food, feeling miserable.

I looked across the table at Noah. The storms behind his eyes weren’t over, but at least he was talking again.

KUDZU played “He Stopped Loving Her Today” to honor the recent passing of George Jones.

Noah cleaned his plate, asked for seconds.

I wish some of this would stick to your bones,
I said, ladling out more pasta.
People think I’m starving you.

You
are
starving me
, he pointed out
.

I am not!

You never take me to McDonald’s.

Why would you want to eat that crap?

’Cause all my friends go there.

We don’t eat crap in this house.

See? You’re starving me. You won’t let me eat what I want to eat.

If I bought crap, you’d eat crap?

Yes,
he said
.

And you call yourself my son? Keep it up and we’ll become vegetarians.

Gross.
He made a face to emphasize his point.

We’ll eat b-o-k c-h-o-y for breakfast and it’ll be all your fault,
I said
.

We can go outside and eat the grass. It’s free!

Exactly,
I said
.

Like we’re goats or something.