Читать книгу Junior Ray - John Pritchard - Страница 9

Some people might say there ain’t much to me, but that’s a gotdamn lie. There’s just as much to me as it is to any other sumbich I know. Yeah, maybe I wouldn’t be here doing what I’m doing if I’da handled a few things different, way back yonder, but I can’t change none of that now.

I guess I started head’n down the wrong road about the time that crazy-ass sumbich Leland Shaw run off from the “Rest Wing” of the county hospital and hid out in old Miss Helena Ferry’s silo for about three months in the winter of nineteen fifty-nine. I wanted to kill him then, and, if he was alive today—and I guess he might be—I’d want to kill him now, and I do. Hell, being able to kill him and get away with it was the whole point of the thing. I can’t explain it. It’s just something about him I hate, and, quite frankly, if you want to know the truth, I really kinda enjoy the feeling, even though it didn’t start out in that fashion: I didn’t hate him at first. In fact, in the beginning I didn’t have no feeling about him one way or the other. He was just what you might call convenient, a sumbich I could shoot and have it looked on as a public service. And that particular set of circumstances would have allowed me to do what I had always wanted to do, namely, shoot the shit out of somebody. But, as time went by, things changed, or at least the way I felt about him did, so that I ended up hating him and couldn’t really say why. I just did, and then it seemed like I ought to have been hating his ass all along only I hadn’t known to do it. Well, as I always say, live and fukkin learn.

Though, personally, if I couldn’t no longer get a rush out of hating the memory of Leland Shaw—and one or two others connected with him—like that high-yellow bitch that come back down here from Chicago that time—I wouldn’t see no sense in living.

I know you probably think I’m an asshole, and maybe I am, but I don’t give a damn. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. And if I ever see one of them coksukkin Mohammedan muthafukkas again, or whatever they call theysefs, I’mo do him like my daddy and them done his ancestors back in Clay City, over in the hills, when I was a little fukka. They had a sign up across’t the main street there that said, “nigga, don’t let the sun set on your black ass in clay city.” By god them ol’ boys meant it, and that’s why Clay City is where it is today.

They all say the Delta’s different, and it is, too. When I got here forty-odd years ago, the Delta wuddn nothin like where I come from. But, hell, I hear this little old Delta town right here was just as bad in some ways as Clay City, like the time back around 1910 when that northern girl’s father got off the train and saw two bucks hangin’ from the telegraph poles and then come to find out they was three more of ’em hangin’ off that big old scalybark set’n there beside Charlie Hayes’s driveway; but, of course, it wuddn nothin’ there then but the tree and a little bit of woods. Later on, the story was that whoever did the hangin’ was after a white fellow, too, but he got away, natcherly. And It wuddn no nightklux what done it—them planters here in the county wouldna put up with that—it was just a buncha town folks that went out and got them niggas and hanged ’em. I sure don’t know what for, and they probably wuddn too sure about it neither. You know how it is when things get started. But Christ almighty, it wuddn no big thing back in them times. Hell, you’re just talkin’ about four or five dead niggas. ’Course, I hear some of them big planters didn’t see it thataway. You can understand it when you realize how important niggas was to them in those days. Hell, they couldn’t get along unless they had a whole house full of ’em. Then, too, them planters liked to be the ones who controlled things, and a lotta times, so I hear, they and some of the merchants in the town didn’t always see eye to eye—like when the klan wanted to come in and some of the merchants wanted to let ’em. Them planters put a stop to that real quick. Well, I mean, they owned the land and near ’bout everybody on it, so why shouldn’t they be the ones to run the show? And it wuddn all bad neither. But that was a another time, and just like anything else, it had its pluses and minuses.

Anyhow, I am no worse than most and not as bad as some, though, Lord knows, I’ve tried. I ain’t afraid to say what I think, and if some bigshot sumbich don’t like it, fukkim.

I said a minute ago “if Leland Shaw was alive.” The fact is, he might be. We never caught him, but I did see him, and the last time—or so I will always believe—was in the car with them Mohammedans later that day when the whole thing suddenly come to an end over at Miss Helena Ferry’s house. I’ll have to get into that directly and, also, that business about the submarine and us meetin’ up with them Boy Sprouts out behind the levee. There was a-lots of things I didn’t understand and, even now, can’t make much sense out of. But it was a wild time, I’ll say that. And me and my old buddy Voyd loved almost every minute of it.

Now, let me just say one thing—maybe two—right here. First, I don’t mind being interviewed and talking about what happened, but I want to get something straight on the front end: All this has got to be wrote the way I tell it.

And second, the other thing you wanted to know about was them “Notebooks.” I’ll get to them in a minute—

I don’t see much of Voyd no more, not since he had his bypass. And then, too, he got married—married Sunflower LeFlore and farmed for a number of years on her daddy’s place. I remember when I let him borrow my patrol car—I was a deputy sheriff at the time—so he and Sunflower could go out on a turnrow somewhere. She got drunk and pissed all over the front seat of the official vehicle and then passed out.

I could’ve gotten in trouble for that. But Sheriff Holston never did find out—or if he did, he never let on—and everything worked out okay. If anything had been said about it, I was just going to claim I forgot to put the window up and a cat got in the car. It really didn’t smell much like cat piss, but I figured it was close enough to satisfy the average person.

I was real young and didn’t think out what I was doing before I did it. And I was a lot carefuler after that, because I realized how much my job meant to me, and I didn’t want to lose it. Seemed like I was meant to be a deputy and I had found my place in the world. But, now, old Voyd and me was real close. He wuddn even a deputy, but he was with me all the time and might as well have been. He had a little refrigerator repair business, but he worked at it so seldom, I swear, I think he about forgot how to do it. Sunflower, well, she was always the kinda girl that keeps her panties in her purse. You know what I mean. Voyd, though, he was blind as a bat to all that. You know love. When it bites a sumbich he either can’t or won’t see shit, or worse, he sees stuff that ain’t there and drives himself nuts and ever’body else around him. Anyhow, one day Voyd comes up to me and says, “Junior Ray, I got to ast you somethin.” And I said, “What is it, Voyd?”

He said, “Somethin’s botherin’ me.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Like Sunflower’s underpants,” he said.

“What about her underpants?” I ast him, knowing sure as shoot’n what he was gon’ tell me.

“They was in her purse,” he said.

Playin’ dumb, I said, “Well, at least, they was in HER purse.”

“What the fuk does that mean!” he hollered and then said, “Gotdammit, Junior Ray, be serious.”

“All right,” I said. “How come they was in her purse?”

“Well,” says Voyd, “I ast her; I said, ‘Sunflow’r, how come you got your underpants in your purse?’ And she said, ‘Well, Voyd, it is the middle of summer!’ And I ast her if all ladies carried their underpants around with ’em in their purses in the middle of summer, and she said, ‘How the fuk would I know! I don’t go around lookin’ in their purses like some people around here. That’s the dumbest question I ever heard.’”

Then I asked Voyd what she finally gave him as the whole excuse, and he said, “Well, she said she did it as a way to com-bat the heat.” According to Voyd, he looked her straight in the eye and said, “Gotdamn, Sunflow’r, how fukkin hot can it be?” Then he said she looked like she was gonna tune up and cry, and she told him she done took ’em off to be more comfortable, and then Voyd said he asked her how can them flimsy little old things be anything but comfortable, and she said he never did believe her and never did trust her and all that crap, and then, Voyd, that dumb sumbich, started feelin’ sorry for her and feelin’ even worse that he had brought it up in the first place, and so, finally, there that coksukka is, and he’s askin’ me:—“Junior Ray, you think I ought to be worried?”

“’Bout what?” I said, like I didn’t know what he meant.

“’Bout Sunflow’r, you know . . .”

And I told him; I said, “Voyd, put it this way, I don’t think the weather is your main concern.”

“What the fuk, does that mean!” he asked me, and I said, “Voyd, if Sunflower is so hot she has to carry her panties around in her purse, then I’d say she’s takin’ her termperature with somebody else’s thermometer.”

Man, he had a fit about that, but he got over it, and I didn’t say no more about it. People do what they’re going to do, and that’s it. I got a philosophy: things work out, or they don’t.

But it’s funny how things change. I never did get married. Me and my old girlfriend, Des—that’s short for Desira, who was a girl back yonder in a Flash Gordon funny book—just more or less stopped seeing one another, and then there never was nobody else special, and, I don’t know, one day it just seemed like time had passed, and I hadn’t paid it no ’tention. Time, I mean.

Now Des, she married Garvin what’s-his-name from down around Dundee—last time I saw him he was cryin’ and eat’n a beer bottle inside the Ole Miss Drive-Inn, a cafe which used to sit up there on the side of the road on the way to Meffis. Nothin’ but an empty building there now. And it ain’t got no roof.

Anyway, Garvin was upset because his first wife had run off with a flim-flam man I call “Temptation Jones.” He was a fellow who come to town one day and, in the course of about a week, got all the merchants to participate in a contest and to put up merchandise as prizes, along with a good bit of cash—one hunnerd and ten dollars to be exact—which he, the flim-flam man, collected and held on to. And it was all to go to whoever could guess the identity of “Temptation Jones.” Theoretically “Temptation Jones” was supposed to turn out to be one of the men downtown, but none of it was ever very clear—except the fact that, on the morning they were supposed to award the prizes to whoever had wrote down the true identity of “Temptation Jones” and was the winner of the contest, everybody waited and waited for the stranger to appear and say who won, but he never showed up, ’cause that sumbich had run off with every bit of the merchandise, all the cash, and, as it turned out, with Garvin–what’s–his–name’s first wife. And that was possibly the strangest thing of all. Shoot, anybody could see why the feller would want the prizes and the money, but nobody could figure out why he’d want to include Garvin’s wife, because it wuddn no government secret that she was ugly enough to make a freight train take a turnrow. Well, hell, Garvin weren’t no movie star hissef. However, he looks a lot better now that Des has took a hand to him and made him dress nice and use hair spray.

But, the truth is, a lot more was disappearing at that time than just those things. And had it not been for what’s just happened around here recently, the whole gotdamn town was on its way to disappearing. It just goes to show, you can’t always tell the difference between when something’s ending and when it’s beginning. A lot of times it looks the same.

Back to Garvin: one morning, before he got straightened out, I remember somebody cut him up real good in a fight, and he was walking right down main street in St. Leo with his arms folded in front of him holding his intestines to keep ’em from falling out on the sidewalk. And it was a good thing they didn’t, too, because them was still the old days, and they’d a’ been stepped on real quick. I was in the City Barber Shop, and I saw him. Say what you will, he mighta had a soft heart, but he was a tough muthafukka.

Anyway, Des got ahold of him and turned him into a solid citizen, made him to stop eat’n glass and become a member of the Lion’s Club. And I hear he did pretty good sellin’ insurance, which is what all them reformed muthafukkas seem to wind up doin’; and him and Des have a granddaughter over at Chickasaw West. That’s in Coldwater. It’s a college. Over in the Hills.

I’m just glad it was him and not me; that’s all I got to say. I never did understand how a man could be married to just one woman all his life. The way I figure it is we—men that is—are more like the buffalo. By that I mean a man just naturally needs to roam the herd and service as many buffalettes as he can. That’s just nature. And—now, I know them preachers would disagree, but that ain’t nothin’ new—I say it is contrary to the way things really are, as I see it, for a man to tie hissef down to one woman for his entire lifetime—shoot, after a while he spends most of his waking moments trying to get away from her, and she nine times out of ten don’t want to do it no more and just wants to “cuddle” or flat wants to be left alone. I be dammed if I’d want to live like that. Hell, I’m better off with cable than I would be with a woman who don’t want nothin’ to do with you but at the same time wants you to do everything in the world for her and who won’t give you time of day much less a piece of pussy which you don’t want from her in the first place. At least you can unplug the TV; and, even if it don’t give you a lot, it don’t ask nothin’ of you, neither. So I say fuk bein’ married.

Move, I got to spit.

And then when you don’t want to mess with ’em, they get mad. Mean, too. I ’member one night back in, I reckon it was nineteen fifty-seven, Des and me was at the MoonLite Drive-In movie the-ater, north of Clarksdale at Lyon, and the mosquitos was chewin’ us up something awful; plus it was hotter’n a bitch in heat, and I was sweat’n like a nigga on election day. Well, we’d been rolling around in the back seat the whole time, and I was get’n somewhat wore out—I mean, let’s face it, you can just laugh so much. And here’s what I’m talking about when I say a woman can have a mean mouth: I says to her, “You want some more milkduds?” And she says, “Damn you, Junior Ray; food’s all you ever think about”—bear in mind we’d been wallowin’ all over my fifty-four Chevy for a good hour and fifteen minutes; didn’t neither one of us know what the movie was about, and don’t to this day—and then she says, “I guess you just druther fart than fuk.” Now, I’mo tell you, don’t many things get away with me; but, man, that hurt.

It was awful insensitive of her if you ask me—but I suppose I can understand it to some degree, because, you see, women don’t fart. Well, they do when they get to be on up in years, but, now, think about it; when’s the last time you seen a young, pretty thing rip off a great big ol’ crowd-dispersing poot? You never will, neither, ’cause they simply do not fart.

Anyhow, it was that time at the MoonLite Drive-In when I could see what it would be like if Des and me was married, and I knew then it wuddn for me. Shoot, I was fairly young then, and I intended to have me a good time without put’n up with that kind of unpleasantness. I mean, screw Clarksdale. Hell, I rather go to Meffis anyhow. And, back then you could still go to the King Cotton or any number of them other hotels and order up whatever you wanted from the bellhop and then be free to do as you please the rest of the time. Plus, you didn’t have to put up with all them mosquitos.

Well, that was over forty years ago. I’ve calmed down a good bit since then. For some time now I been going over to Sledge to see this woman. Her husband died and left her a house, a nineteen eighty-six Coupe de Ville, one nem big-screen TVs, and six hundred acres of rice which she rents out for about sixty-five dollars an acre. With all that and social security, she lives pretty good. Hell, she ought to. She worked twenty years at the mattress factory the other side of Lambert. Anyway, her and me gets together about twice’t a week, and mostly we cook out on the grill and watch Matlock. Once in a while, however, usually after the first frost, she fixes chittlins, and that’s some good eat’n—slung or unslung, it don’t matter to me, fried or boiled. When it’s chittlin cookin time in Quitman County, son, I’ll be there.

But, you know, as much as I love them things, I do think it is strange that so much fuss is made over a pot full of hog guts. Yet, they’s just something about ’em, and once’t you get hooked on ’em, you can’t ever turn ’em down even when you know what they are and where they been. I just try not to think about it, but it’s hard not to do when you know what you’re putting in your mouth. I mean it is peculiar. I know people that would shy away from a raw oyster but wouldn’t think twice about bite’n into the fricaseed asshole of a five-hundred-pound pig. If you figure it out, let me know.

I’ve improved a whole helluva lot since I first came here. I even go to church a good bit because, whereas I used to think God had it in for me and was after my ass, I now know that God is a god of love—and, if you don’t b’lieve it, he’ll burn your butt in hell for e-fukin-ternity, ’cause, you see, and here’s what people don’t understand, He is also a just God. Somehow, all of a sudden, everything made sense. See, there’s a difference in the ways of God and the ways of men. As I say, I been goin’ to church pretty regular for some years now, and I know what it means to know the Lord. Let me tell you, a sumbich don’t know peace until he knows Christ. The way I figure it is, if that muthafukka came down here and died for my ass, then the only way I can thank him is by doing his will, whatever the fuk that is.

I’m a lot better about all that now than I used to be. I’m not sayin’ I’m deeply spiritual. Fuk no. I’m just sayin’ I’m a somewhat better individual than I was when I was real young and workin’ as a deputy for Sheriff Holston. Then, I wuddn nothin’ but a hunnerd-dollar gun slung on a two-bit ass. Well, that’s what old Sticks Ferry called me one day. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, yet I guess now that I got a few years on me, I have to agree with him. But I still didn’t like the sumbich—well, hell, he didn’t like me.

Back to Leland Shaw, it ain’t no secret that I wanted to shoot the crazy muthafukka, and that’s a fact. In my opinion, it woulda been a good deed. But some of them assholes didn’t see it that way, and although I didn’t know it then, I can see now that that episode was probably the beginning of the end of my career as a deputy.

I never woulda gotten to be sheriff. You have to be elected to do that, and, in these Delta counties, even though things was changin’ and changin’ fast, back then you had to be somebody that didn’t need to be sheriff if you wanted to be sheriff—hell, we had sheriffs around here that didn’t know the first thing about law enforcement; they was cotton farmers. Although I will say this, and that is, a lot of times, back then it seemed to me we had less law and a good bit more justice. But all that’s gone now. Yessir, gone with the fukkin wind.

And the same thing has happened in other parts of the state and in other states, too, so I hear. I really never traveled much—only been to Jackson five times in my whole life. Didn’t think much of it, to tell you the truth. Last time I was there was in 1965, and a friend of mine and I stayed in a whorehouse down near the railroad station. Place looked like something out of a Saturday western. The room had one nem wash stands with a pitcher! But the thing that I can’t help remembering is that there we wuz in that Saturday–western whorehouse, and right across the street, in the King Edward Hotel, was all them legislaytchers—you know, senators and such. And I thought about that, so that, now, lookin’ back on it all, it’s hard for me to say which house had the most whores.

Anyhow, the Leland Shaw thing is what I want to talk about, and I keep getting off the subject.

In a way I hated him because he was not the maniac everybody had thought he was and that I, of course, had hoped he was. You see, it was my one opportunity to really do something, and that crazy sumbich fukked it up, mainly, by not turning out to be the menace to society that, for a while, everybody believed he was and probably, like me, needed him to be. You know how people are. They want life in a small town to be something more than what it actually is. But, as you you know, what they want don’t ever stay wanted.

Neverthe-fukkin-less, when it all started, it was my intention to save people and to do something good for the county. Then, little by little, all that changed. and I had to admit I just wanted a chance to shoot somebody. There wuddn no two ways about it.

I couldn’t stand the thought of being a deputy in a sleepy little old Delta town, carrying a gun all my life and never get’n to put it to the use for which it was intended. Let’s face it, a thirty-eight was not designed for hunting rabbits or for shoot’n turtles offa logs. Nor was it intended for some silly-ass target practice. It was designed for one thing and one thing only, and I was not about to carry that side arm around all my life and not at least once’t shoot the shit out of somebody.

I didn’t figure I was no different from them old sumbiches in the Bible. They didn’t let a day go by that they didn’t run out and slay or otherwise smite somebody. In fact, the biggest smiter of ’em all was old God, hissef. Now that’s one advantage of going to church all the time, I learn a lot. Turns out I ain’t too much different from old Jehovah, personality-wise. ’Course, I’m the first to admit there’s also some major differences, too. But if you want to know about smiting, take a look at Deuteronomy and at Joshua. Those two coksukkas were experts at it.

Now, though Leland Shaw was not—as he bygod ought to have been—dangerous, he was crazy as I don’t know what. I got no sympathy with a sumbich that goes crazy in the first gotdamn place. That’s one thing I had against him. He goes to war and loses his mind. Shoot, I’d about lose my mind if I didn’t. But you probably know the story—I had a bad back . . . if it hadn’t have been for that, I’da been right over there in Korea shoot’n them little slant-eyed muthafukkas and pokin’ their women sideways and havin’ me one helluva time. And that’s just what Jehovah woulda done. I forget where he says it, but he tells the chosen people to go into a place and put all the men and boys to the sword and to take the women and the animals for themselves. If I’da knowed all that, I’da been goin’ to church a lot sooner. It just goes to show that the Lord does work in mysterious ways. I’m livin’ proof of that.

In fact, one time a sumbich said to me that I was absolute proof that there wuddn no such thing as evolution. I took that as a compliment. I guess he was some kinda preacher.

Anyhow, here’s what that crazy sumbich Leland Shaw done. He comes home from the war, that’s Dubbya Dubbya Two, and goes to live with his mama who was getting on up in years. It turns out he has been shellshocked or something because, even though the town put on a big celebration for him and called it welcome home leland shaw day, he didn’t seem to be too sure about what was going on. And when they asked him what he was going do now that the war was over, he said, “I’m going home.” They thought he meant his mama’s house.

Unh–uh. Think again, muthafukka. That sumbich was talkin’ about St. Leo, the actual town itself. He, it seems, did not believe he was home. And that is partly what led to the whole buncha stuff that followed some time later.

You know a sumbich is crazy if he’s set’n right there in his mama’s house and don’t believe he’s home. But, get this, as it turned out, he not only did not believe he was home, he thought he was still over in Germany. How a sumbich could hang around here and swat these crow-size mosquitos and think he was in Europe is a mystery to me. I ain’t ever been to Europe, but I read about it and I seen plenty of things about it on cable, so I know that it ain’t nothin’ like it is here in Mhoon County, Mississippi, in the Delta.

Nevertheless, that’s the way he was. And on top of it, he believed they was some German soldiers following him around and was after him. Occasionally he would have a real spell of that, and he’d go hide. After a while, we got to where we would know where to look, and we usually was able to get him to go on back to his mama’s house, where he would disappear for quite some time.

But she died, and that’s when things really started to go from bad to worse. For a while, he seemed to get along okay. He worked up at the lumber company and wouldn’t never say nothing to nobody—he just come to work every day, did his job, and went home, back to his mama’s house. Nobody never paid him a whole lot of attention, although some people expressed concern, sayin’ they didn’t know how he was going to get along in the years to come, not havin’ anybody to look after him and all. I heard about it, but I didn’t give a damn what happened to him one way or another.

Why? I’ll tell you why. Here he is, a soldier home from the war. They give him a parade, such as might be called a parade in St. Leo, and had a buncha people make speeches—all about how Leland Shaw was a hero and had this and that medal give to him, and all the time that crazy sumbich is sit’n up there on the platform not believing for one moment that he has come home at all, and, at that point, nobody realized he was that way. Hell, first time I laid eyes on him when he got back, I knew he was nuts.

And what really gets away with me is that there he was, born with a silver spoon up his ass, his great-grandfather the founder of the town, and him, the asshole in question—the so-called hero—growing up a little clipped-dick sissy livin’ with his mama and daddy and them crazy old aunts of his next door. And the worst one of them was that gotdamn nigga-lovin’ Miss Helena Ferry. She was somethin’ else.

How can a sumbich like that turn out to be any crazier than he is in the first place, much less become a coksukkin overly decorated war hero who’s done got back home and don’t even know it? I mean, even though he seemed to recognize ever’thing, he still, somehow, didn’t know where the fuk he was and didn’t believe you when you’d tell him.

Anyhow, there it was, Leland Shaw livin’ what appeared to be an all-right life day to day, yet, unbeknownst to the town, at this point anyway, thinkin’ German soldiers was following him around trying to get him, and thinking, too, that he was still somewhere in Europe. “Silesia” he called it. Maybe that explains why he picked a gotdamn silo to hide out in when he run off. But there ain’t no explainin’ what a crazy person thinks. All I know is that sumbich ruined my life.

Well, maybe he didn’t do it directly, but I’m where I am today because of him. And I don’t know where, or even if, he is.