Читать книгу Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around - Cheryl Wagner - Страница 9

Somewhere before Mississippi we gave up on Memphis. Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee was blustering on the radio that he had canceled his big birthday blowout. A hefty Chinese-American-Louisianan in an even heftier cowboy hat, Lee was a big Willie Nelson fan and a robust singer. He often took the stage at his annual “Chinese Cajun Cowboy Fais Do Do” fundraiser to belt out crowd favorites like “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” or “Wind Beneath My Wings.” His gigantic plaster bust of himself was probably already down at Hilton Riverside, waiting to be showered with fortune cookies.

The way the storm was sucking the fun out of everybody scared me. If the storm missed us and hit Mississippi, the remnants would probably just blow all the way up to Tennessee and rain on our duck parade.

“Let’s just go to Gainesville,” Jake said.

Jake’s mother was a former cheerleader from Georgia who had recently retired from teaching middle school art in Florida. After decades of grimy clay hands and tempura paint, Brenda was a devotee of both swabbing and order. She met us in the front entryway and stood on her tiptoes, with a towel in one hand, hugging Jake.

“I brought this in case you want to wipe off their feet,” she said, pointing at Clo and Buster. “Good to see you.”

“They’re not dirty,” Jake protested, kicking off his own shoes. “They’ve just been riding in the car.”

I slid out of my sandals and put them in the designated shoe lineup. I handed Jake Buster’s leash.

“Hold him and I’ll do Clo first so she doesn’t run,” I said.

Clo hated having her feet touched and growled like a motorcycle whenever you approached them. I got down on my hands and knees to wrestle her with Brenda’s towel. For an arthritic skeleton, Clo was strong.

Jake’s stepfather crunched into the dog-decontamination chamber. Jack was an entomologist with a big white mustache who specialized in the sex lives of fruit flies. He was the only person I’d ever met who had a parasitoid that eats flies named after him.

“How was your trip?” Jack said.

“Ah, you know,” Jake shrugged.

“It’s a long booger,” Jack agreed, bending down to pet Buster. “Buster, how you doing, old boy? Looking regal as ever. Play your cards right and we’ll be going to TCBY.”

In his post-divorce days before he met Jake’s mom, Jack had lived wild and free with his two children, a cocker spaniel named Rex, and a free-roaming gecko on patrol for natural pest control. Now his two children were young adults. He was down to only an extensive collection of dead bugs on pins and Brenda’s obese and dying cat, Oreo. Dog-lonesome, he showered Buster and Clo with vanilla frozen yogurts and six-dollar dental bones whenever they visited.

“Did you move the potatoes?” I asked Jake’s mom.

“I remembered the potatoes, but Jack, I think you forgot the puffer fish,” Brenda said.

Clo’s paws were as antiseptic as they were going to be. I got up and handed off the towel to Jake to swab Buster. “I’ll move it,” I said.

No matter how long it was between visits, Buster and Clo remembered their favorite trouble spots. Buster would beeline for the bowl of potatoes on a cart in the kitchen. Clo favored the hairy, Southwestern fertility tchotckes and animal bones on display on some tables and low shelves. When they weren’t locked in the garage, the two would go around smearing their wet noses on things and Brenda would scramble to decontaminate the spots. I decided to attempt to keep at least Clo on her leash for the entire visit.

Jack stretched flat out on his back on the living room floor next to Buster.

“I don’t know why, but Buster reminds me of Winston Churchill,” Jack said.

Buster raised his chin slightly for Jack to scratch his soft throat. Still on her leash, Clo flattened herself next to my feet and grumbled, pouting.

“It’s all that skin on his neck,” I said. “It’s like an ascot.”

“You know you might be right. I always chalked it up to his bone structure,” Jack said. “I was reading this article about truffle pigs the other day and I thought, Buster could do that. Before you leave, Jake and Buster and I might need to go out Chicken-of-the-Woods mushroom hunting.”

Brenda wandered into the kitchen.

“Jake,” Brenda called over the counter. “What do you think you might feel like eating for supper? I could make spaghetti. You like that.”

“I’m not really that hungry,” Jake said. “But thanks.”

Jake’s mother was always saying some dish was his favorite and Jake was always saying the opposite behind her back, that some dish was so leaden with onions that it left him doubled over, clutching his stomach. This had been going on for at least the entire nine years that Jake and I had been together. I did not know why and I did not care to know why. We should have gone to Memphis. I wondered what those marching Peabody Hotel ducks were doing. Probably wearing hats, cruising that gilded travertine pond.

“I’m calling my mom to see if she’s going to evacuate,” I told Jake.

“I wonder if Flash left,” Jake said. “I wonder if Stan left.”

“Hopefully,” I said.

Mom’s a Super Doppler 6000 fan and possibly an addict. Sometimes when I’m on my way to visit her or she’s on her way to visit me, she’ll call at the last minute and reschedule.

“There’s a supercell over Manchac,” she’ll say. “You better wait.”

Jake got her a weather radio for Christmas. A few years before that we got her a spooky balsa wood Indian weather stick. You nail it to a tree or wall and it bends up for sunny weather and down for rain. When I was a teenager, I found her weather obsession maddening. Later, I attributed it to her friend’s husband who got killed in Mississippi trying to save his boat from Hurricane Camille. Lately, I wondered if it was from being a child on a farm in the forties, watching her father look up at a darkening sky and wonder if they were going to have any money that year.

“Are they evacuating Hammond or not?” I asked.

“Only up to the interstate where it’s low-lying,” she said. “Where we are it’s optional.”

“So they’re mandatory evacuating within a few miles from you, but you’re not going to leave,” I said. “Why don’t you just go to Baton Rouge?”

I had heard that a lot of people in Mom’s area were driving up to Baton Rouge to try to get out of the reach of the worst of the looming storm. We have family there, so I knew Mom and my developmentally disabled sister Lori who lived with her would have a place to stay.

“I don’t want to get stuck on that interstate,” Mom said. “We’re not going to flood here.”

“Probably not,” I said. “But why every time there’s a big thunderstorm do you call me to complain that a pine or an oak tree is going to fall on your house?”

“Because one did! Twice! I have two other trees I need to get checked. But those men want a thousand dollars!”

“If it’s going to fall on your house in a bad thunderstorm, why don’t you think it’s going to fall on your house now? It might be a Category five, Mom. Why don’t y’all at least drive up the street to the arena? Did they open it?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “But I don’t want Lori to have to get stuck in all that traffic or get stuck all night in the arena.”

“Lori might enjoy it. It’ll be a commotion,” I said.

In Hammond, Lori walked around like she was the Strawberry Queen. New caregivers were always surprised how many people knew Lori. Thick, country black ladies and thin, white Pentecostal women would call out to Lori across the movie theater parking lot to greet her with her own sayings. “Hey sweetheart, you get that money?” they’d say. Lori would holler back, “Yeah, swee-heart, two dolluhs!”

“Maybe she’d like it,” Mom said. “For half an hour. But when she’s ready to go, you better believe she’s ready to go. Then what?”

“Bring a Valium,” I suggested.

“Sure,” she said. “No thanks.”

When I was growing up, I was in charge of Lori, and it is understood that one day I will be again. In recent years, I do very little besides get weekly debriefings, like at any moment the Cheryl-Jake regiment could be called to active duty. Consequently, I usually know whether Lori and her sheltered workshop co-workers are packing bay leaves or shredding hospital documents and which developmentally disabled person in her small town called which other developmentally disabled person a bitch that week. Although Mom still worked and did not act elderly, she had gotten her Medicare card awhile back and cruised in a boat-sized Mercury Grand Marquis. Sometimes I worried that any day I might have to step in and pry Lori from her suddenly demented fingers.

“If your trees are rotten, they’re rotten,” I said.

“If we need to go at the last minute, we will,” she said.

This seemed like a lie, and a weird one.

“You know the winds come first. Then you’ll be stuck.”

“Tell Jake his radio is working good. We’ll just pull the mattresses and sleep in the hallway like we used to for a tornado warning,” she said. “Lori likes the hallway.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” I told Mom.

Brenda glanced up wide-eyed from her cutting board. I took the phone outside so Jake’s family would not overhear any more foolishness. I wasn’t sure Florida people had to talk to their relatives like this to get them to evacuate.

“I want you to really think about this. I don’t think Lori can handle being in some six-hour storm with stuff crashing on the house. She’ll be scared.”

Silence. I couldn’t believe it. Mom was hyper-responsible. To her own detriment usually. Not in my wildest dreams did I think it would have been necessary to swing by their house on our way out of town to snatch Lori.

“If you make a bad decision for yourself that’s one thing, but I don’t think it’s fair to Lori,” I said. “You’re in charge. It’s not like she gets a choice.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she said.

“Well, you’re making me stressed.”

“Stop worrying. Go enjoy your visit. We’ll be fine.”

I stepped back inside. Clo was in the foyer waiting. Jake and Buster were sitting on the back of their necks watching Murder She Wrote. I knelt down on the floor to hug Clo.

“She won’t evacuate,” I said to Jake.

Jake sat up. “What?” he asked. “With all she bugs us about the tiniest weather crap? That’s crazy. Tell her to go to Baton Rouge. She’s going to wind up there anyway when her power goes out for a week.”

“Don’t tell me. She could just go up the street and she won’t. She said she’s going to lay on a mattress in the hallway with Lori and your radio,” I said. “We should have never given her that radio.”

Jake shook his head and laughed.

“It’s not funny,” I said. “What if something happens?”

“I know it’s not funny,” Jake said. “I don’t think it is. I just keep picturing them on that mattress.”

“I’m really worried.”

Jack strode into the living room wearing his expedition pants. Its safari pockets were bulging. He smiled.

“Who wants to go mushroom hunting?”

Jake’s aunt had left some hobnail milk glass dishes and Gone with the Wind lamps in Florida for me. I e-mailed to thank her and she e-mailed back.

I’m glad y’all are safe and sound. Hope the house is almost finished so you can quit spending all your time painting. It would be terrible if something happened to your house, but it also might be a good thing. You could rebuild with insurance and everything would be new!

It would be more than a pain. We would have nowhere to live. The whole people getting an MTV-style crib after a fire or mud-slide or disaster seemed pure urban legend—perhaps one people retold to make themselves feel better about emptying their pockets to insurance companies. Injury was injury. I had never met a single person who emerged from a car accident or a house fire fundamentally better off than they were before they went in. I didn’t believe in clouds with silver linings. I believed in clouds.

After the mushroom hunt, Jake sprawled back out on the living room floor, lost in cable TV, his preferred retreat position when visiting home. I looked up from my laptop.

“Deanna thinks if we lose our house we’ll be blinging in a McMansion,” I said.

He grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

We were no financial analysts. In the nineties when our landlord wanted to dump our house because it needed a new roof, gutter, and porches and he was sick of paying old men $10 to nail flattened tin over broken windows and floors, we jumped on it. Jake had signed on the dotted line when he was twenty-four so he, I, his drummer, and an artist friend could all keep cheap rent. For some reason, the fact that we both worked and jammed the rest of our time with music and writing projects and had no carpentry skills or repair money between us was no deterrent.

Jake’s drummer at the time was a Memphis art school dropout from Arkansas who waited tables at Commander’s Palace. Even though we had all hung out the upstairs windows slapping on the first coat of primer that had touched the house in decades, we barely passed inspection. Our initial inspector, a woman who had just passed her inspector test, took one look at the house and shook her head. She told us she did not want to lose her new license. The inspector slid us the number of a portly Yes Man who arrived mouthing a cigar. This ancient Yes Man doddered around the property, declining to huff upstairs or bend down to peek under our raised house at all. He told Jake how he had strafed German trains in World War II. He thought Jake looked like a nice young man who would have enjoyed it. We passed with flying colors.

During the evacuation before this evacuation, Jake and I had talked about pulling our heads out of the clouds and getting our shit together. We were overexposed in more ways than one. Our house had appreciated in value since the bargain-basement nineties, and we were underinsured. But after we got back from that evacuation, our vow to set our house of cards in order somehow got lost in our whirl of whirl.

My mom, who saw us most often, had long lamented that our entire management system was more a case study than a best-practices text. She would give me flowered file folder boxes for gifts. Picking her way through amps, guitars, cords, piles of books, recently stripped shutters, and a friend’s oversized paintings of outer space on her way to the bathroom, she would announce, “Someone is going to break their neck!”

The weather forecasters were really enjoying themselves. They were shaking their arms at the digital red blob like it was the latest dance.

“I’m going to bed,” Jake announced. “I’m not watching this all night to see if it turns or not.”

I was exhausted but needed to stay up to see if the storm was going to veer far enough toward Mississippi to miss us. This guilty last-minute wishing is the dirty secret of the final hours of storm watching—thousands of Louisianans and Mississippians pitted against one another wherever they are, screaming into their televisions at the wobbling red curse on the satellite, Go left! or Go right!

Sometime in the wee hours my mother’s electricity went out. I called her and her voice sounded thin. The wind was howling and now she wanted to go to the shelter. It was too late. She sounded frightened and old.

“What’s the Weather Channel say?” she asked.

The TV kept saying it was the widest storm ever. It said it would go on for a deliciously long time. The TV was excited. It could not wait for us to get hit. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what was coming her way was hours and hours from ending. Her health had not been great in the past few years. I felt sick. I hoped she did not have a heart attack listening to the wind howl and waiting for her trees to fall. I slunk off to bed.

When I woke up a few hours later, I called Mom back. Her cell phone was out. I called her on her house phone. It was out, too. I turned on the television. There was no point willing it this way or that. It was too big. Jake’s mother padded into the kitchen.

“How’s it going?” she said.

“Terrible,” I replied. “My mom’s phone went out.”