Chapter 8
THAT SOLITARY INDIVIDUAL
Even with the breeze the attic was too hot to work; Langston tapped her pencil on her desk, then smoothed the yellow, lined paper she preferred for writing, tapped and smoothed. Every day Germane followed her up the stairs loyally, even though she had explained to him upward of eleven times how much cooler he would be on the front porch. He lay beneath her desk, close to her feet. She absentmindedly rubbed his belly with her foot, smoothed the paper, stared out the window at Chimney Street.
She was so hot her skin felt itchy, so she slipped off her blue jeans and her T-shirt and lay down on her bed to read. She had embarked on Kierkegaard’s
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing,
which had somehow escaped her during all her years of study. She had only gotten through the translator’s notes over the past two evenings, because the day’s accumulated heat made study difficult. The pillows, the cool, white cotton pillowcases, felt divine against her skin. She lifted her braid and leaned farther in.
Something has come in between,
she read.
The separation of sin lies between. Each day, and day after day something is being placed in between: delay, blockage, interruption, delusion, corruption.
Langston closed her eyes, and her mind filled with images almost immediately, as if she were beginning to dream. She thought of Hermes Psychopompos, who leads us over thresholds: between life and death, between sleeping and waking. As the psychopomp, Hermes carried a staff of intertwining snakes. Snakes. She saw two women, one with her heel on a serpent, and another moving her hands, her fingers like panicked birds. She thought of a verse of the Bible she loved but could hardly remember:
I will return
. . .
I will give back
. . . First Kings? Leviticus? She saw her own body as if in a glen, naked, and she looked like her mother, and there were large, flying . . . what were they? flying away from her body, leaving her bare and sleepy. Locusts.
I will restore to you the years the locusts have eaten
. That was it.
*
Every day during May Germane and Langston left for their afternoon walk believing they were experiencing the last perfect day, but every day there was another. Friday following their nap was still bright and hot, but the humidity was low, and there were so many trees and flowers in bloom, Langston felt like she’d stepped into a gorgeous, impressionistic painting:
Girl and Dog Abroad in Flanders
. She had promised AnnaLee she’d pick up a pie for her to take to Beulah’s that evening, so they set off for a quick stroll with the diner as their final destination.
The first person they passed, on Taft Street, a short thoroughfare in a state of advanced hopelessness, was a girl (now a woman) Langston had gone to school with, Stinky Williamson, who was sitting on her front porch drinking a Coke. Stinky waved, and Langston waved back. Stinky and her melange of relatives lived in a small house built on and of concrete blocks, and there were always many cars in her yard and around her house elevated on concrete blocks. Indeed, Langston often expected to see the Williamson clan using them as shoes. Stinky was one of Langston didn’t imagine even God knew how many children, born perhaps to a mother and perhaps to a sister, sired by one of a number of men so whiskered and reeking they could not be considered by a tender imagination. Her older siblings had earned the names Scratch, Trotter, Dumpy, Tubby, and Weevil (to name a few), and Langston once overhead Stinky tell a curious classmate years earlier that she earned her name for refusing to “potty train,” which was how the Williamson clan referred to urinating in the dirt surrounding their house. Taos had concluded from very early on that the Williamson children were named in the Native American way, after an event or a personality glitch had asserted itself firmly, and before that they were probably just called Baby.
Stinky’s fate was predictable. She was placed in progressively slower and slower classes in school until she simply dropped out, pregnant at fifteen. She never left her parents’ home, and continued to live there now, with no vocation or occupation other than producing more Stinkys. She was quite large and slow-moving, and every time Langston saw her, Stinky acknowledged her in a very friendly way; they had, after all, grown up together.
Farther down Taft they passed the home of the local piano teacher, a strange, tall woman named Hetzebel who had broken away from her Holiness family at eighteen and now lived alone, teaching secular music and periodically setting her house on fire. No one knew how or why, but one in five calls to the volunteer fire department were from her. Langston had once asked her mother what she thought of Hetzebel, and AnnaLee had replied, “She needs to concentrate more on
water
.”
They turned onto Main Street at the east end, and headed for the diner. Along the way they came upon Old Frankie Lamotte and his son, Frankie Lamotte. Frankie and Frankie, in order to contribute something lasting to the world, carved statues out of tree stumps with a chain saw. The statues surrounded Frankie Sr.’s backyard like a ghastly wooden zoo. There were eagles in flight, a bulldog, a bear with raised claws, a slinking coyote (which Frankie the elder called a kye-ote), and their latest creation, a squirrel nibbling on a nut.
The Frankies waved their free hands at Langston and Germane and then continued putting the finishing touches on the squirrel. The chain saws whined and died down to a hum, whined again. Apparently the Lamottes’ gestures had to be very precise and delicate, or as delicate as one can be with a chain saw. Langston stopped and considered the menagerie. She tried to determine what the single most alarming thing was about the carvings, and then realized that the squirrel was the same size as the eagles, and they were the same size as both the bear and the bulldog which was approximately the height and width of the kye-ote.
The rest of the trip to the diner, another block, was without incident, but when Langston opened the door to the small restaurant her breath was nearly sucked out of her body by the dry blast of the window air conditioner, which was running at full speed and creating a deafening racket. The owner had taped streamers to the top of the unit, which were sailing out horizontally, presumably so her customers could have a visual representation of how cold they were.
The diner was, architecturally, what the locals called a shotgun house. From time to time Langston listened to a call-in radio show, broadcast from the AM station in Hopwood. Bill Linklater was the host’s name, but he had taken as his
nom de air
Bumpkin Bill, and considered himself an expert on trivia. Langston had, on occasion, picked up an interesting little tidbit of knowledge from Bumpkin Bill and his callers, and one evening a man called in and asked how shotgun houses got their name. Bill said he believed the name was born of the fact that one could stand in the doorway of such a domicile, fire a shotgun, and the shell would travel straight through to the back door. Langston had been horrified. Who initially realized such a thing? she wondered. Whatever reason would one have for firing a shotgun into a house in the first place? Language evolves, of course—Langston very well knew this, even though she had withdrawn from Transformational Grammar twice in her graduate school career, before completing it her final semester—if it didn’t we’d all still be speaking Elizabethan English, or more accurately, painting stick horses like those in the caves at Lascaux. But it seemed to her that some evolutions would be better aborted. The barbarism we have revealed, she thought, in our homely speech.
The bells on the diner door clanged as she pushed it shut, and before Langston could protect herself, she was forced to take in her surroundings. Some days she was able to ignore the aesthetic travesty of her hometown; sometimes she felt it acutely.
Four booths lined the wall to her left, with a broken jukebox intersecting them. The table tops were cloudy gray Formica trimmed in silver, with silver legs bolted to the floor. The booths were red vinyl. Most of the seats were sprung, with hollows into which thighs uncomfortably nestled. The middle of the room was taken up by tables for four made of the same despairing materials, and to her right was a counter where five or six people could eat facing the kitchen. The vinyl on the floor, originally white with gold flecks, had yellowed and was peeling in places, revealing black tar paper underneath. There were two ceiling fans spinning ineffectually, their blades gummy with old grease and dust. And hanging randomly about, as if the diner were trying to be a parody of itself, were old speckled strips of flypaper. Not only was it repulsive to look at, but Langston was certain it was unhygienic, as well as unacceptably cruel. A few years before, when she was home from college for a visit, she had tried to engage the proprietor, a surly red-haired woman of indeterminate age (she must have been in her early sixties, but had adopted the style of dress and makeup of a cheerleader from the
1950
s, which she had never been), named Lu. Lu was a professional smoker and barely had a word for anyone, so Langston approached her hesitantly at first, and then with more confidence. She asked Lu if she had ever been introduced to the concept of karma. Lu didn’t reply. Langston briefly defined it for her, and then explained that many adherents of Eastern religions believed that one’s karma was affected by any kind of violence, even against, say, the common house or diner fly. Lu smoked and stared at Langston, but said nothing. Langston searched her eyes for any sign that Lu was following the line of reasoning, and saw nothing but ashtrays and bowling balls. Her spiritual desolation made Langston breathless for a moment, but also more resolved.
Langston went on to describe the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage every Muslim must make at least once in his or her lifetime, to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Mecca, Langston said, was surrounded by a “zone” called the Haram, which had been established by the Prophet Abraham and sanctified by the Prophet Mohammed. In the Haram not a single living thing could be harmed, not a blade of grass, not a wildflower, not even a troublesome bug.
“Do you see where this is leading?” Langston had asked Lu, smiling at her in a way she hoped indicated goodwill.
Lu continued to give Langston an inscrutable gaze. Her short hair was dyed red, but her single eyebrow was black and gray. The skin around her eyes was so wrinkled her eyeliner spidered off in many directions, and her face was riddled with dark brown spots—the archaeological remnants of tanning, Langston guessed. Lu’s mouth was permanently puckered from drawing on cigarettes, and her lipstick, probably chosen for her by a sadistic Avon lady, was a ghastly pink.
Finally Lu opened her mouth, and the smell that emerged could have come from the earth’s own furnace. “Are you going to pay for that pie, or do I have to call the deputy?”
Langston was grateful to see that Lu was nowhere in evidence today, being a bit uncomfortable around her since the karma colloquium. The diner was almost empty. Herschel Lewis sat at the counter, sipping coffee and reading the farm report in
The Crier
. He was retired, but as Langston understood it, work habits die hard. The top of his bald head was maple-colored from years in the sun, and his gnarled hands made the paper look slight, like the wings of a moth. And here was a thing that had, over the years, impressed Langston about the older residents of her hometown, especially the farmers: Herschel’s white T-shirt and bibbed overalls were immaculate. They even looked pressed. She felt her heart sway a bit in her chest. How lovely lovely and fortunate for him that he was able to be happy with the little bit he was afforded in this narrow life! Oh, for a moment, how she yearned to be one of them. The moment passed.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the conversation between Wally Blevins and his constant companion, Larry McCoy, who were sitting at the counter next to Herschel. Both men were in their early forties, wearing old T-shirts and stained blue jeans, along with seed caps: Wally’s advertised a fertilizer plant called Sohigro, and Larry’s proclaimed his membership in the Nubian Goat Society. Herschel was studiously avoiding them.
“Would you have done it? I mean if you was him.”
“Hell yeah!” Larry replied, but not too loudly. “I’d a done it if I was nobody.”
Langston cleared her throat. No waitstaff was in evidence.
“Did you read about them things she done? Man oh man.”
“I heard about it on the news. Had to send the kids to bed early. I asked Linda would she, you know, if I bought one, and she slugged me upside the head.”
“The thing about it is, and this is what the girls at the plant keep saying, is that she’s gonna be
famous
. She’s gonna be in history books, and all because she—”
“Can you imagine? Can you imagine being famous for doing that?”
Selma Sue appeared behind the counter and raised her eyebrows at Langston. She would be the server for the day, but didn’t bother saying so.
“Hi, Selma, hi, I think my mom ordered a sugar-cream pie? Is it ready?” Why was she always so nervous around these people, Langston wondered, as if she’d done something terribly wrong?
Selma studied her, then flipped through the little pad in her apron, giving Langston time to consider her and her idiosyncratic style choices. Over her standard issue, white polyester dress, which looked like it had been purchased at a nurse’s yard sale, she was wearing a hot pink apron that bore the legend “Shut Up And Eat.” Near the top of the apron she had attached a little metal button that read,
I’m sorry, but you’ve mistaken me for someone who gives a shit
. Her hair was cut in the most curious style: it was very short on the sides and on top, cut all the way back to her crown, and then long and straight in the back. She was tanned and puffy, and moved with a strange swivel, as if one of her hips were misaligned. Without a word, she turned and headed toward the back of the diner.
“She ain’t bad lookin’, you know. A little fat.”
Larry agreed. “If I was gonna do it, I’d a got me a supermodel. What the hell. I don’t need a bunch of thighs at the party. I could stay home and get that.”