State of Grace (11 page)

Sweat drips from my armpits and falls down my sides. The air is full of ozone, like it was before the accident. I could smell it then—something about to let go—and it has come back. My eyes float and bump against the scene, trying to organize it, for I am afraid that freakily this is my friend, Corinthian Brown. I cannot see his face. I get up from the chair and step solidly on my paper bag of wine, our party gift. I drag my foot up quickly but the wine is gone, the bag flat, a hole in the bottom and the brown paper stained. Beneath my sandal straps, my toenails are broken and my feet ache. I sit back down again. This cannot be my friend, Corinthian Brown. Though his arms beneath the plum blue jersey are a honeycomb of scabs, though his hands windmill wistfully in space, it is not him at all.

“John here has been messing around all the way since Chiefland,” the deputy says. “Ain’t you?” and he jiggles the black man, rearranging him to face us like a sack of feed. The man’s face is round and middle-aged, his chin and eye pouches pale, two stringy lines of white descending from his mouth and his lips jammed shut as though he were holding a jawful of milk. “Drunk and stinking up that pretty bus. Bothering them nice people.”

He looks serene and amused and grips the pillowcase like a strangled hen. He is not Corinthian. My friend is young and morose, lovely with his nervousness. He is sick, Corinthian. He would never be traveling on a bus.

I should be relieved but I’m not. Something flutters in my stomach. The baby moves and jabs my spleen with his watery head. I touch myself there. My belly is crooked and there is a hard ball on the left where it has settled for a while. At night, I lie with my stomach against Grady’s flank. It beats against him and makes him dream. Sleeping, Grady moans and trembles like a dog, ill from the straw and dust he has eaten under the impression that it was marvelously delicate food. No one mentions him here.

“You nothing but a bother to us all, John,” the deputy says and drops his arm. He walks over to where Darryl is sitting, reading the Sunday comics. The black man looks around the room, swallowing. Swallowing, it seems, once for each thing his busy eyes rest upon. There is an open door and behind it the cells. The windows are single high plates of glass. There are filing cabinets, a tree in a pot bearing real oranges. The floor is a set of different colored tiles, like a game, and the man sets one sneaker down lightly on a new tile and then brings it back again. He spits between his feet. He shifts the pillowcase from his left hand to his right and swings it around like a bat, hitting the departing deputy in the ass.

Darryl drops the funnies in the paper plate of food he’s
eating from and my man Ruttkin’s face turns gray as a sheep on the spot.

No one makes a sound and no one moves except the surfers who back their shanks deeper into the bucket seats. They stare and look adventurous, as though they’d been brave, squinting and hunching their shoulders like gangsters. I would like to say a few words or make a noise of some sort, a cough, hiss or clap, but something seems to jam me up. The thing slips membranous over my head and my mouth fills up with air. It is too late, it is ritualized. The moment turns from chance to rite and the four deputies are together now, for Darryl has run from behind the desk. He has an enormous torso but tiny sick legs and there is a stain on the fly of his pants. But they are all together now and circling the black man who still looks distant and bemused, who swings lightly the guilty pillowcase. He isn’t even watching them—he is an audience like me, watching this in some far-off balcony—and they walk around him in a tight circle, walking faster and faster and I think perhaps that they might turn to butter like the tigers did and we will sit down to stacks of pancakes. We will swallow them up and later void them in the scrubbed latrine, over the scented bulb that is wired to the bowl, and flush them into the holes beneath the town … I smell a small smell of whiskey now and flame and the black man smiles and gives a happy growl.

“Mother,” he says.

And the deputies fall on him, softly and without noise like dogs on a barnyard duck. There’s a dull splash and smack and the man’s ear begins to bleed, the pillowcase slides across the floor and out of it falls a clock,

a comb

and a can of pears.

I can’t even see their hands moving, they’re jammed so close, but I see the two white sneakers planted in the thicket
of professional country blue and Tinker’s thighs churning up and down as though he’s peddling a bicycle. I tell you, I can’t feel a thing. I’m a wastebasket, and if you were honest, you’d admit it too.

I am reading the newspaper and I start to cry. They have taken the man away now. His face was red, sealed and shimmering as though with the cellophane on a box of Valentine candy. The surfers are gone too, leaving a puddle of sea water behind them. Across the room are small signs. A piece of tooth flew through the air and struck my hair, I thought, but I have not been able to find it. And the tiles seemed trampled and discolored where they beat him, but I know that this is just a function of the surface of my eye.

The deputies have sent out for french fries and 7-Ups and I am crying on the newspaper sports section. I have not cried for so long, for so many years, that there seems something wrong with the way I am doing it. I used to think that loving and breathing and crying were things that you never lost the method of but this is just not so. There is nothing that
cannot be forgotten and learned in a different way or never learned again.

Ruttkin, too, seems to think that I am not crying but am in the process of something else. He stands beside me and runs the tip of his finger around the neck of my sweater, picks up my wrists and regards my dirty ankles. He has learned this maybe by heeding Dick Tracy’s Crimestopper Notebook. He is looking for a chain, a disc, a tag.

“You ain’t an epileptic? You ain’t a diabetic?” Ruttkin is relaxed. On his knuckles are teeth marks. His shirt is wet where the black man has drooled. “The hospital,” he says, “says there ain’t a bit of change. You aren’t wanting to go over there, are you? If you want, I’ll take you but I’ll tell you about them hospitals, they don’t tell you a thing. You ask and they answer something that don’t make sense. Or they answer you something you never asked.”

I flap my hand vaguely at him. I want nothing in common with this man who is happy as though after a meal, who is showing his teeth at me in a commiserating grimace. I feel uneasily that his discoveries are the same as mine, that the methods he has chosen to get through the days, the weeks and into the years that he can put behind him are no different from my methods. The result’s the same—we trample people in the eagerness to get on with our dying. Yes. I know what he says is true. I cross my legs and kick him in the knee, still crying. He crazily apologizes.
I don’t quite understand your question but whatever it is the answer is no
. Yes. That’s the attitude. That’s the way of this world. The answers are all to something you’ve never even asked. Now Grady balked at this. Like some, he was more fortunate than most. When he wanted to know how to tune an engine, there were instructions for doing it. When he was young and wanted to shoot and sight and track, there were rules for that too and all he had to do was listen and learn them. He grew up trusting in the sanctity of the right reply. He was confident and hopeful
and bright. And not without imagination. And honor. For when he found that I was going to have a baby, he kissed me gravely and married me in the afternoon. The ring was made of wood and too large for me. I packed blue tissue beneath it to keep it on my finger and when the tissue rotted, the ring fell away. I don’t know when but now it’s gone. Grady wouldn’t mind. He traced my thighs and the sockets of my eyes, he was so in love.

Every girl remembers her wedding day. Excuse me … I have a cold and my tongue is green from flavored throat lozenges. It is raining, the sky is almost black. There may be a tornado. As I run from the car, I slip on wet pine needles and fall, catching my hand on the barbed wire fence that separates the chapel from a field. It is auspicious for my hand doesn’t bleed. It lies snagged there as Grady helps me up but there is no blood and Grady laughs and kisses it and folds it up gently in his own hand. Gently, as though the hand had been severed, the ring, the marrying hand, and he were saving it, gently as though it were a wounded bird. There are big friendly mules in the field behind the fence and beside the chapel is the preacher’s pickup truck with a brace of shotguns hanging in the window rack. For everyone is a hunter here, even the meek; everyone is prepared here for something terrible coming out of the black hot southern afternoon that they will have to protect themselves against.

Yes, every girl remembers, but as for the ceremony itself … The words, I suppose, would be the same that Father used although Father would first teach that loving is good preparation for dying. I was the only one who learned this. Everyone else seemed uncomfortable at the thought. Perhaps they believed that loving was what made a happy life. And I often wonder what became of those who Father blessed …?

My eyes are breaking from this crying. Poor jockey Durousseau. I cry and cry. I sizzle and choke. A long time
before this, in the time when I wept, I cried never for grief but from frustration. That had a pattern to it, a rise and fall, a stretch and slack, an end in sight, but this crying now can go on forever, like this day that goes on into continuing night. The land revenges itself upon us all, for I passed through that time as though through a dream, with no knowledge in my flesh of snowfall or handstroke, knowing nothing but dreaming those days in my head.

 … We are going out for dinner. The Jaguar moves like a ghost through the dusk. A graven image, a negative, and us inside, leaning into the turns. Grady, my young man, all blond like wheat, takes the corner and falls out of love with me … 
love in his watchtower darkling and in ambush is stretching his deadly bow
.

For it was clearly love, make no mistake, that met my yearning Grady on the curve. The falling hatchet loves the lamb and when bones ache, they ache for the breaking. It’s love that starves and makes us murderous. And it’s Father who is in the watchtower, watching from his steeple study through the snowy nights, with his hands folded across his eyes. I was so frozen, so embalmed then … I left, a pioneer with no tools for discovery, and not the sense to know that this made all the difference, traveling from the ice and cold and his abstraction into the South, the sun and reality. I was surprised at how easy it was at first. I developed a miming manner and was accepted everywhere. But all the while, he was knowing my life before I lived it, knowing that each step I took would only bring me home again. Oh yes, it was dark and obscure Father who struck my Grady down.

Grady was taken completely by surprise … His face didn’t change, nor the muscles in his throat or arms. He is a good boy. I could see his mind beating, like a yolk dropped too soon in formaldehyde. And now I keep answering but he never asks any more. If I had told him a lie, we could have lived it better than any truth, but he had made me feel so
hopeful … He wasn’t afraid of anything. He was so ambitious then, and proud and confident. He thought that life was infinite and incredible and that for every question he might have, there would be an answer and the answer would be right.

Yes, Grady thought that there were only as many answers as there were questions in the world. He believed that, in the end, everything would come out in an implacable and just balance and pairing. Some things existed and some didn’t and he told me he could tell them apart. He couldn’t imagine there were people like me who had answers to questions no one would ever ask, that there were those who lived without a life, like moths without stomachs, lived for years with their lives beyond them someplace, dangling useless on a gallows.

In love, Grady wrapped himself around me like a twining vine. He didn’t know that I had an answer for which there was no question. And that one day I’d give it to him. Yes. The very worst kind.

I cry aloud. Poor Durousseau. The tears splash on the newspaper and on my hip-hugger pants. They are of some cheap shiny fabric and there are marks all over them … a perfect paw print from the dog, quite old, coffee and candle wax and now these stains. Nothing washes out, I’ve found. I do not follow racing any more, although as a child, I had memorized the names of every Derby winner. The jockeys never interested me. In the photographs, they had the smooth faces of dwarfs, tiny waists and wardrobes. I was a child. They reminded me of evil playmates with terrible knowledge. I dismissed them and dwelt on the horses. I kept their pictures, tracing them out of magazines onto tissue paper. I knew their lineage, records and running times and could recite these statistics without error. Memorization then took the place of something else, something deep, deep, which I did not want to touch. I wanted order and it was everywhere.
I memorized everything. There was nothing I could not talk about with vacuity. It was a masterpiece, my childhood.

Tragic Durousseau. Nothing unusual about it. Doom is accurate and vengeance is all the Lord’s. Picture the horse galloping since a colt toward Durousseau … The thing that waits for all of us doesn’t even bother to hide its identity or kid the survivors into thinking it was something else. In the Middle Ages, for example, I know for a fact that when dragons preferred to wear a human shape, there were certain discernible idiosyncrasies. They had wide mouths and flowing red beards and sometimes retained their horns. If you were paying the slightest bit of attention, you could avoid the dragon but this isn’t the case today. No quarter is given. Endings never come outside our experience and there’s no attempt at gamesmanship or artifice. Luck is not involved and wit or caution is useless. You catch up with it even when you’re dragging your feet.