The Right Thing (12 page)

I drive the car through the gates onto the river-sand road leading to the backstretch. A tall, black man in a khaki uniform steps out of the guard booth, shining a flashlight inside the front seat. I roll the window down. The night air, substantially warmer and more humid than that of the freezing truck stop back in Mississippi, fills the interior of the car with smells of wet dirt and horse.

“Evenin', ladies,” the guard says. His security badge gleams in the glow of the flashlight. “Little late for visitin', ain't it?”

“Hey, Bone Man,” Starr says, bright as a rhinestone tiara, flashing him that too-white smile. “Remember me?” She leans across the console into the light. The heavy cabled sweater stretches taut across her breasts and with that single move Starr manages to transform herself from a pregnant woman who desperately needs a bathroom into a sexy chick in a BMW.

“It's Starr, honey. I'm back!”

The guard, Bone Man, chuckles. “Well, well. So you are.” He tips his hat back on his head and gives her the once-over, the smile never leaving his face, but I don't think much gets by this man. “Heard you were marrying a rich Mississippi lawyer, wasn't going to have time for us working folk anymore.”

Starr flashes that smile again. “Now, Boney, you know I never, ever forget my friends,” she purrs. “Speaking of friends, this here's my oldest friend in the world—Annie. Annie, say hey to the Bone Man.”

“Hey,” I manage. In the back seat under my parka, Troy thumps his tail and the guard shines the light over my shoulder. I say hastily, “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise, ma'am.” The look the security guard gives me makes me feel like he knows exactly how I look in my underwear. I feel the hot blush spreading upward from my collarbones and have to force myself not to shrink out of the light.

“Always good to meet one of Starr's friends,” Bone Man says, clearly enjoying this.

“We're here to see Bette,” Starr interjects.

Bone Man cocks his head to one side. “What you wantin' with Bette? Ever since that little spic she shack up with went and took that spill, broke his leg, and gone back home to Miami, she been in a bad way—just 'bout murderize a person, you so much as say good mornin'. Not like Bette ever easy, nohow. All them hormoneys she take.”

“Oh, Annie and me, we got some catching up to do with ol' Bette,” Starr says. “I already called and let her know we're coming by for a visit.”

Of course, I've never met this woman before in my life, but I smile up at Bone Man, too, nodding like an idiot while inside I'm ready to strangle Starr. I thought my sole responsibility was to chauffeur her to New Orleans and back again, and now I'm supposed to “catch up” with murderous Bette, she of the out-of-whack hormones? Starr didn't care to share this information beforehand, I seethe to myself. Why? More secrets?

“Well, Bette's trailer be where it always be,” the Bone Man says with an affable smile, “just behind the cafeteria. Y'all pass a good night.” With a wave to us, he steps back inside the guardhouse.

I roll up the window and pull the BMW through the gates before I turn to Starr and demand, “Honestly, why'd you tell him that? I'm not going to talk with
anybody
in a trailer tonight. I'm going to wait in the car while you get your money and then we're hightailing it back to Jackson!”

“Hush,” Starr says, sounding like she's preoccupied. “Just turn here and park behind that semi.” She points into the dark at a big, battered horse van with Virginia plates. Beside it, a good-sized Airstream trailer is backed up to the eight-foot fence surrounding the Fair Grounds. To the left of the Airstream is a low cinder block building with yellow-lit windows. It must be the cafeteria because the trailer's practically on top of it.

“You can wait here if you want to,” Starr says. “But you should come on in. I, I . . . think you and Bette would have an awful lot to talk about.”

“I can't imagine,” I say, feeling mulish. I slam the car into park, turn it off, and fold my arms. With a shrug, Starr gets out.

“Think on it,” she says, her hand on the door frame. “She's kind of... well, somebody you should meet.” She waits for me to answer. When I don't say anything, she shrugs again and walks away into the night.

I can't go in there, I think, watching Starr climb up the steps of Bette's Airstream. There's no telling what kind of person lives in a place like this. Hell, there's no telling what you might
catch
in a place like this. The wide, old-fashioned travel trailer is lit up like an oil rig, decorated with strings of multicolored Christmas lights and Japanese lanterns draped across its aluminum roof and curved sides. Silk palm trees in pots flank the fold-down steps: it's hard to tell in the dark, but I think they're hung with plush monkeys and plastic parrots. A healthy pile of black garbage bags spills pink silk magnolia blossoms on the ground around the lacquered Chinese-red bench positioned underneath a window that's tastefully curtained with a Confederate flag. It appears the Airstream decoration process is a work in progress.

Starr knocks and waits for a minute. The door opens, and a Myrtistine-sized woman wearing a bathrobe stands backlit, hair in rollers, her fists on her considerable hips. There's an excited exchange, Starr goes inside the trailer, and I'm alone out here in the dark. I lock the doors again. Minutes pass. Emerging from under my mink, Troy Smoot pokes his nose under my arm. I can't imagine what he could want, but after my scare at the truck stop, I'm sure not going to take the chance of letting him run around loose behind the racetrack. Maybe he just wants out of the car. I decide I can handle it, if I'm careful.

“C'mon, dog. Let's go have a smoke while we're waiting.” I pick Troy up, unlock the door, and get out, holding him in my arms. He doesn't weigh much and licks me under my chin. “Yeah, I like you, too, but don't get any big ideas. We're not going to be here long.”

Across the night, a light east wind carries the nearby music of guitars and a happy, loud chorus singing some kind of repetitive Mexican song. This fiesta is coming from inside the cafeteria next door. Troy's nose twitches at the smells of frying meat, cumin, and onions on the wind. It sure sounds like they're having a good time in there, whoever they are. I glance around in the darkness, lit only by the Christmas-light-festooned Airstream, but Troy and I are alone out here.

What's keeping Starr? Shifting the dog in my arms, I try to read my watch: I think it's 9:15. If we leave in the next ten minutes, I could almost beat Du home. I mean, how long can it take to collect twenty thousand dollars, say good-bye, and go? And if Starr and Bette are such old friends, then why didn't she tell me about this damned special relationship when I asked before? Secrets again, Starr and her secrets.

But Troy's getting heavy. I'm going to go sit on the spindly red bench under the Airstream's Stars-and-Bars-hung window and smoke a cigarette. Nudging a garbage bag of magnolia blossoms out of the way with my boot, I plop down with a sigh.

Damnation. I remember I left my purse in the car. I debate going back to get it so I can have that cigarette, then decide it's probably better if I don't. What if I dropped an ash on one of these plastic bags of silk flowers and set the whole tacky mess on fire? The guitars across the way finish with a flourish, in one of the nearby barns a horse whinnies a coda, and in the lull I realize there's a conversation going on behind the window overhead—Starr's voice and a husky contralto that sounds weirdly familiar. She's in there “catching up” with Bette, I think irritably. Starr's been gone a long time, and I really do need a smoke: it's been hours since I had one.

“Come on, Troy, I'm going to go get that cigarette.” I go to stand up and find that I
can't
. To my disbelief, my ass is stuck to the bench like it was glued to it.

“What the . . . ?” I exclaim to Troy. I turn to look over my shoulder and smell the flat plastic smell of wet paint. Ol' Bette or somebody else must have just painted this bench and the night's humidity has kept it from drying. My entire backside and sweater have to be covered in Chinese-red lacquer, and now I'm one with Bette's bench.

Furious now, I try to get up again and for an unbelievable moment the bench gets up
with
me before it tears free of my paint-covered behind in a ripping sound. The bench lands upended with a thud on top of the bags of magnolia blossoms. I'm cussing a blue streak and holding a now-wriggling Troy and simultaneously trying to get a look at the seat of my jeans to see how bad things are when the trailer door bangs wide open.

A mountain of a woman descends the rickety stairs in an avalanche, her arms swinging. “Who the fuck're you, vandalizing my property?” Each metal step screams for mercy under her enormous bunny slippers.

“Hey, I only sat on your bench . . .” I begin, stupefied at this vision of trailer doom advancing upon me. This is Starr's
friend?

“Who said you could sit on my goddamned bench?” the mountain bawls as she closes the distance.

I back up a step—who wouldn't?—and my feet get caught up in one of those damned garbage bags. I fall over backward in the dirt like a load of spilled gravel. Troy Smoot jumps out of my arms and dashes up the steps into the trailer between Starr's legs as she appears in the doorway.

“Hold up, Bette!” Starr cries. At her feet the dog is barking a lunatic chorus.

“Shut up,” Bette snarls over her shoulder. She looms over my sprawled body and announces, “Now you're gonna get it.” Pushing the sleeves of her bathrobe higher on her tattooed arms, she bends down and grabs the front of my cashmere sweater, and even with the acre of makeup covering that brutal face, oh my God—I know who this is, I do.

“Buddy Bledsoe?” I squeak, shielding my face with my arms. “It's me, Annie Banks. Please don't hit me!”

A
t school on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Miss Bufkin began assigning roles in the second grade's holiday pageant. Her class would be performing the Christmas Story, while the other one would provide carols and the stage setting, she told us.

“Now I know all you children want to be good little boys and girls, so there'll be no talking amongst yourselves while I assign everybody's parts.” Miss Bufkin waited a moment for our excited whispering to cease.

Mine was one of the first names Miss Bufkin read. I'd be playing the Archangel Gabriel, an unlikely bit of casting by any yardstick. I knew it would be a small part, but at least I wasn't going to have to be a shepherd like Lisa Treeby: Miss Bufkin's class was low on boys compared to the other one, and so some of the girls were going to have to stand in for the male roles. Lisa, the tallest kid, was a natural for head shepherd. Roger Fleck, the booger miner, was to be the mean innkeeper who wouldn't let Mary and Joseph inside the inn before Baby Jesus was born. Joel Donahoe, still deeply tanned from the Pelahatchie work farm, was Balthazar, the black Wise Man, and Laddie Buchanan was a weak-chested Joseph.

Starr was the Virgin Mary.

I was flabbergasted. Why on earth had Miss Bufkin given her the starring role? Ever since school began, our teacher had shown no interest in Starr whatsoever and this was a plum of a part. Still, I reached across the aisle and squeezed Starr's hand when Miss Bufkin's attention was elsewhere. Starr looked so happy, but just as amazed as I was because Mary was a big role: she'd be on stage for nearly the whole play. We even had a scene together, when I as Gabriel came to Mary and announced that she was going to have a baby. In her desk behind me, Julie Posey savagely whined to one of her friends that it wasn't
fair
. That show-off Julie was the innkeeper's wife, a practically nonexistent part with no lines except for “They can go sleep in the stable!”

But fair or not, our class was put to work that afternoon rehearsing while the other class got to paint sets, make props, and practice Christmas carols. Outside the cold rains of late November fell on the dead grass, the leaves falling to the ground in wet drifts under the sweet gums and cedars, but inside the classroom was warm and nobody worked on their health booklets but practiced their lines instead. Starr was amazing. It seemed she had only to look at the mimeographed sheets a couple of times and she knew her part cold. In fact, the only other kid who learned their part better was Lisa Treeby. Lisa was so good at memorizing that in two days she knew everybody else's lines as well as her own, promptly supplying them whenever someone was even a little bit slow remembering their part.

By the end of the week, it came time to try on our costumes. The terror of Fairmont Street, Buddy Bledsoe, and another big fourth-grade boy, Bobby Shapley, hauled the dusty cardboard boxes in from Miss Bufkin's station wagon, dropping them on the floor in scarcely concealed disdain. Their second-grade Christmas pageant was decades behind them. All of us crowded around the boxes as soon as the big boys swaggered out of the room.

When Miss Bufkin pulled Mary's blue gown from the heap of costumes, the mystery of Starr's casting was revealed. The sky-colored robe was made for someone her size—that is, the smallest girl in the class. The white veil looked good over her blond curls, too. Laddie's long, brown costume kept getting hung up on the wooden donkey's wheels and making him trip, so Miss Bufkin had to tuck the hem with safety pins: last year's Joseph must have been a giant. Gabriel's gold-painted cardboard halo kept falling off my head, and the chicken-feather wings were fairly moth-eaten, but they were still big and fluffy, so for the most part I was content with what I was going to wear. Poor Lisa's tunic looked like it had been made from a gunnysack. Julie's dress wasn't much better, but at least she didn't have to wear a beard like Lisa did.

The next week, we moved our rehearsals to the school's auditorium. Pretty Miss Bufkin took to tying a scarf around her throat and wearing a dashing beret like a real director, and in the girls' bathroom the conversation was of nothing but the makeup we'd be allowed to wear for the play. Being a bunch of seven-year-old girls, we were fascinated with makeup—powder, eye shadow, rouge—but what had us all in a whispering fever of anticipation was
lipstick
. Lipstick was the flashbulb-popping, red-carpeted threshold between little girls and real teenagers. Our mothers wore it every single day without exception, wouldn't leave the house without doing up their mouths. We had all been madly impatient for our own tubes of grown-upness even before the pageant had consumed us, and now we were practically on fire.

Of course, Julie Posey already had a pink lipstick in a baby-blue case. Since we weren't allowed to wear it at school, she didn't put any on in the girls' bathroom, but only showed it off to everyone when we went in there before lunch to wash our hands.

“It's called Pixie Pink,” Julie announced. All of us were crowded around her, ready to throw up with envy.

“But this one isn't for the play. It's kind of babyish.” She dropped the lipstick into her purse and closed it with a snap. “My mom's going to buy me a red one—Revlon's Fire and Ice.” Julie shrugged off her loyal hangers-on and surveyed her reflection in the mirror over the dripping sink. “We're going to Beemon's Drugs this afternoon.” She fluffed her ringlets and squared her hair ribbon's bow. With a flounce of her skirts, Julie pushed through the big swinging door and left the bathroom.

Starr and I washed our hands in silence as the other girls filed out after her. I caught her eyes in the mirror and made a face.

“Show-off,” we both said at the same time. Linking arms, we left the bathroom, giggling.

 

Saturday morning came, a day that couldn't make up its mind whether to storm or merely rain. I'd spent a restless morning inside. After Methyl Ivory fixed me a bologna sandwich for lunch, I sat with it under the sunporch windows on a wicker settee, watching for Starr while I nibbled the sandwich around the edges. Methyl Ivory was running the Bissell Sweeper over the sunporch's tiles and humming to herself. I was hoping she'd hurry up and leave, for I was on fire to put my scheme into action.

My mother's purse sat on the kitchen table, just off the sunporch.

Inside that purse was a lipstick.

If Methyl Ivory would only finish her floor sweeping and go away, I planned to borrow my mother's bright red lipstick, maybe her compact, too. Then Starr could show me how to make up my face for the Christmas play since she already had plenty of pageant experience. I was sure my mother would never realize the lipstick had been out of her purse for a couple of hours because she was upstairs in her bedroom this afternoon, her hair covered in a bandanna, wearing no makeup at all. Engaged in Ladies' League Snow Ball business, she was making giant snowflakes out of white poster-board sheets, silver glitter, and Elmer's glue. In fact, I didn't expect her to come downstairs this afternoon for anything, not until it was time for dinner.

“Mary had a baby, hmm-mmm,” Methyl Ivory sang under her breath.
Brump, brump
went the Bissell Sweeper as she finally moved her floor cleaning to the front hallway. “She call the baby Jesus, mmm-hmm.”

I eased off the settee with a cautious glance down the hall, then tiptoed in my sock feet across the sunporch into the kitchen. Carefully, I eased open my mother's black alligator pocketbook. There it was, beside her keys, cigarettes, and lighter: her makeup bag. I slid the brass clasp open, and lying on top of her powder compact was a lipstick in a golden case. It was in my hand when I was startled by my mother's voice.

“Methyl Ivory?” she called. She was descending the stairs. “Can you bring that up here to the bedroom? There's glitter everywhere.”

I snapped the makeup bag closed, abandoning the compact. Like lightning, I skidded across the newly swept red tiles of the sunporch to the settee, where I plunged the lipstick under a throw pillow. Picking up my discarded sandwich, I hastily took a bite the instant my mother walked through the door from the hallway.

“What are you up to this afternoon, Annie?” she asked me. Flushing with guilt, I nearly choked on my bologna and Wonder bread, but then she said, “Today's such a gloomy day, I know. It's starting to rain again. Are you and Starr going to play here?”

I gulped the bite of sandwich before I lied. “We're going to Lisa's house.”

My mother frowned. “Is Mr. Treeby going to be home?” she asked. “I'm sure he's not going to want you girls disturbing him while he's working.”

I blushed, remembering the last time I'd been at the Treebys' house: Lisa's father hadn't been working then, but I had no doubt I'd disturbed him as much as he had disturbed me with his picture book.

“Oh, we'll be real quiet,” I assured her. “We're going to read Bible stories. Starr's got a big book of 'em, with lots of pictures and the words of Jesus in red letters. We'll go by her house to get it before we go to Lisa's.”

“Well, that's all right then. You won't go inside the Dukes house, though, will you?” My mother gave me a stern look. She didn't have to say anything more. Starr's house might well have a drunken Mr. Dukes in it.

“No, ma'am.”

“Have a nice afternoon, then, and take an umbrella,” she said. “Remember to be home before dark, Annie. I think I'll go make myself a cup of coffee.” With a smile for me, my mother went in the kitchen. Quick as a snake, I palmed the lipstick, shoved it into my pants pocket, and went back to looking through the window for Starr.

“Methyl Ivory? Are we out of coffee?” my mother called from the kitchen.

Where was Starr? Down by the Allens' fence, something big and black finally caught my eye—an umbrella with a somewhat bedraggled Starr waving from underneath it. She was wearing a yellow raincoat that was so long it dragged behind her on the brown grass.

“There she is—I've got to go.” I shoved my feet into my waiting Keds, shrugged into my own raincoat, and grabbed an umbrella from the stand by the back door. “Bye.” The screen door banged shut behind me. Hurriedly, I squelched down the hill to the fence. The rain was falling slowly, but by the time I got there, my shoes and pants cuffs were soaked through.

“That's a really big raincoat,” I observed while climbing over the fence.

“It's Momma's—she left it, too.” Starr's voice was muffled underneath her umbrella. “Did you get the lipstick?”

Thrilled with my successful “borrowing,” I nodded. “It's a
red
one.”

We trudged up the Allens' backyard and angled in the direction of the rental house in case anyone was watching. This subterfuge was necessary to keep my mother from figuring out we had no intention of going to Lisa's but were headed in the opposite direction. We didn't dare use the lipstick at my house, and Starr's poppa was at home and working on his sermon. Starr didn't have to remind me that he would take a more than dim view of little girls playing with makeup. It was grounds for another whuppin', I was sure, so we planned to cross Fortification Street and go down to the abandoned garage by the railroad tracks for some privacy.

It was a well-used place, the old garage. Kids from every grade for blocks around the neighborhood congregated there. Perched on the hillside above the railroad tracks like a shabby mockingbird nest on a sumac branch, the rotting wooden structure smelled of the long-collapsed privy in the back, the ghosts of engines and motor oil. It had once been part of a larger establishment, a house probably built back in the days before Jackson's zoning laws would have rendered a place without indoor plumbing impossible. The old foundation of the house was a great place to play war, though, with its bunker-like, fieldstone sides, the ground littered deep with blackjack oak mast. The garage itself had been spared whatever cataclysmic event—a fire, a tornado, or the family falling on hard times and forced to abandon their house—had transpired. As far as I knew, nobody's parents had a whisper of a clue as to the garage's existence, but occasionally there'd be signs some wandering bum had stopped for the night: an empty pint whiskey bottle, the remains of a campfire, a sooty Castleberry's beef stew can in the middle of the ashes.

That afternoon Starr and I sneaked away from her house and turned onto Devine Street, where we walked to the woods at the dead end. Looking over our shoulders, we slipped between the two huge old live oaks standing sentinel at the slender opening in the trees. The hillside path to the garage was treacherous today, with sodden leaves piled underfoot, the hard-packed earth slippery beneath our shoes. Starr and I tried to make our way through the woods by holding onto bare-branched saplings, but the umbrellas kept snagging on their spiky limbs, and she kept stumbling on the bottom of her yellow raincoat. Finally, we gave it up, slid downhill, and walked the railroad tracks winding through the bottom instead.

“I don't hear anybody, do you?” My breath misted in the cold. As we approached the garage, the woods were silent. No other kids had claimed it for their own on this rainy Saturday afternoon.

“Nope,” Starr said. “I think we're the only ones today. C'mon.” We furled the umbrellas and, bending almost to all fours and using the umbrellas like ski poles, we struggled up the steep hillside. The three-sided structure welcomed us out of the gently falling rain. It was darker inside the garage than out, but still there was plenty of light to see the old International truck crouched on its axles atop four cement blocks. Long ago, somebody had removed its doors, too.

We dropped our umbrellas into the bed of the pickup. Starr and I climbed up onto the seat, avoiding the rusty springs poking out of the rotted upholstery, and huddled together in front of the cracked rearview mirror. Outside in the woods, the rain began to fall harder, pelting the leaves and the old tin roof overhead.