Читать книгу Strangers to Temptation - Scott Gould - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTHE LONG SUMMER I DABBLED IN RELIGIOUS ECSTASY, Eddie Baxley’s 1972 gray Lincoln Continental was the only thing in our neighborhood with decent air conditioning. This was the big, heavy model with suicide doors, the ones hinged toward the middle of the car, in the wrong place, it seemed to me. Once the weather went full-on hot in mid-June, my father spent most of his afternoons in the Lincoln. He’d fill an empty spackling bucket with Old Milwaukee cans and ice chips and march (a military pace with as much good posture as he could muscle) across the street to Eddie’s yard, where the Lincoln sat large and looming on the little rise above the sidewalk. Eddie Baxley owned a garage for years and years, so he’d run across good deals on nice cars every month or so. The Lincoln he got for a steal. An old lady from Andrews let it run empty of oil and the engine seized just off Highway 527. She told Eddie she’d had enough of big, ugly cars and he could have the Lincoln for five hundred dollars. Eddie died six months after he got the Lincoln running again. Between Christmas and New Year’s, a heart attack hit him while he lay on his mechanics creeper beneath a Ford pickup with a bad transaxle. My father slid him out by his bare white ankles and said he’d never seen a more surprised look on a dead man’s face, like he’d discovered something important, like a new country.
I’ve never known whose idea it was to park the Lincoln in Eddie’s yard and sit in the waves of cold air and watch the neighborhood shimmer in the heat on the other side of the windshield. But it sounds like something my father would’ve dreamed up. He was a smart man, smart enough to never put decent skin in any game he happened to play. Which is why I can see him talking Eunice Baxley into making the Lincoln the coldest place on our street and letting him set up shop with his bucket of beer. But it might’ve been her idea. She had been a stranger to the outside world since her husband died under the Ford. Maybe she arrived at the point that she just wanted someone to talk to. Because as far as we could tell, that’s what my father and Eunice did in the front seat of the Lincoln—talk away the afternoons while the cool air blew on them.
They kept the windows cracked so they wouldn’t die. And they didn’t have to worry about wasting gas because they got all they needed for free, from McGill’s Esso station out on Highway 52. The entire town knew Mr. McGill had family money and ran the Esso station for fun. At least that’s what my old man said. Mr. McGill sipped Old Crow and Sprite from a coffee mug most of the day, so when it came time to close down the station and turn off the lights, he could never seem to remember to shut off the pumps. He would walk away and leave things running all night. My old man would sneak over to the Esso station long after dark and fill the big tank on the Lincoln. He wasn’t the only one. A dozen or so people in town knew that McGill was too buzzed to shut down his pumps at closing time, and they helped themselves to some fuel as well. Everybody said McGill could spare a little, with all he had. I have come to understand now that these people saw the free gasoline as reparations for a long-since-gone offense of some nature. It was an easy, innocent revenge.
When I had twenty-five cents I felt I could part with, I sat in the back seat of the Lincoln and listened to my dad and Eunice talk. It reminded me of a kind of church. They talked in low tones, in that adult code that I had only begun to decipher. I thought if I sat there long enough, the words would start to mean something important, something I hadn’t learned to figure out by myself. My mother had dragged me with her to the Kingstree Methodist Church every Sunday morning for as long as I could remember. The words there were different, all wrapped up in stained glass and candle wax and little bread cubes on a tray. There, I listened to Reverend Scoggins talk about God and the Devil and the existence of miracles in the real world. And when I had a quarter in my pocket, I listened to Eunice Baxley rant about the weather her husband tolerated in Korea and to my dad go on about Vietnam and tiny men in black pajamas. I remember thinking at the time that the Lincoln would probably do a better job than Reverend Scoggins of getting me to heaven, as long as there was enough free gas at McGill’s Esso to make the trip. This was the summer religion started to confuse me.
My mother wasn’t pleased about the admission fee to the Lincoln. “I can’t believe you charge your own son to sit in that car,” she said one evening, without looking at him. She rarely made eye contact when they discussed each other’s shortcomings. I imagined she thought his eyes possessed some sort of magical x-ray power, and if she stared into them for too long, she would lose bodily functions. Granted, his eyes were strange and growing more different each day—darker and sunk deeper in his head. By the summer of the Lincoln, he was rail thin from his relentless stomach problems, and the eyes seemed to burrow backwards little by little while the rest of him retreated to the surface of his bones.
“I’m teaching these youngsters a life lesson,” he said. “You want to be comfortable, you need to check the price tag. If you want a little cool air across your neck, you got to pay for that pleasure. Pleasure costs.” He paused. “The cold air is a metaphor, you see.”
“Maybe you can save up all those quarters you’re taking from the neighborhood and buy us an air conditioner. This fan won’t be much pleasure come August,” she said back, and she was right. The house was hot all the time now, and the little fans my mother planted in the rooms hummed day and night, doing nothing more than stir up the hot air. The noise from all of them running and oscillating made our house sound like the world’s largest active beehive. I learned to sleep without moving a muscle, which I thought was somehow cooler in the midst of the swelter. I taught myself to sleep inside the noise.
But my father wasn’t saving the money. He used the quarters to buy more Old Milwaukees at the IGA food store. Sometimes the line to get into the Lincoln would be a half dozen kids long. Never any adults, always kids. We each bought a half hour for twenty-five cents, and my dad would only let two at a time into the big back seat, because, he said, he “wanted us to have enough room to stretch out and really enjoy the cold.” I received special treatment because I was his son. I was allowed to go solo in the back seat. And sometimes he would let me stay more than a half hour. The inside of the Lincoln smelled like beer and pine trees. I liked to shut my eyes and feel the air moving across my skin and pretend I was at the North Pole. I listened without looking, imagining the words blowing in the air.
“You realize Eddie would tell us this isn’t really cold here in this car,” Eunice Baxley said. “You don’t know cold, he would tell us, until you are sitting waist deep in a mud hole that’s got ice floating on top of it and wondering if your toes are still attached to your feet and wondering if those infidel Chinese are going to run over the hill at you, but then you get to thinking that they are cold too because for all the things Chinamen ain’t got, they do have toes and their boots ain’t no better than yours and so Eddie figured their toes are freezing off so there will be no running involved with what they had heard was the impending invasion of mud holes by said Chinamen. That’s what he’d say. If he were here.” When Eunice became a spokesman for her deceased husband, she tried to spill out everything in one thin, desperate breath, like she wasn’t sure she’d be allowed the chance to draw another. I supposed that’s the way you begin to think when your husband rolls underneath a Ford one afternoon and never comes back.
My father always sounded more thoughtful, more philosophical when he talked about his war. “I saw a bug melt one day,” he said. “This bug was pretty as it could be, all multi-colored, and it flew through the air and alighted on my gun barrel. And when he landed, he just started smoking. Little puff of smoke. Then he melted into a greasy dot of Vietnam bug goo right on the barrel.” He paused. “That’s how hot it was. When you can melt bugs on your gun barrel, you got some heat going, sister. Trust me on that one.” He liked to let his words hang in the cold air, hovering above the low-throated idle of the big Lincoln.
There would be a silence, as they let their stories settle into the floorboards—the only sound the whirr of the air conditioner. I felt the Lincoln rumbling under me. And Eunice would inevitably reach across from her passenger’s seat and touch my father’s hand. “Eddie, Eddie, dammit,” she said, and I swear they forgot anybody else was in the air conditioning, as rapt as they were by the strength of their sad recollections.
The hotter the summer became, the more time Eunice and my father spent in the air conditioning. On Sunday mornings, my mother would half-heartedly ask my father if he was going to put in an appearance at church, and he would say, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m heading to my place of worship right now.” Then he hauled the spackling bucket across the street to the Lincoln. We’d leave him there and drive our own car to the Methodist Church. “I don’t worry about him ending up in hell,” my mother said one morning on the way to church. “He’d figure out some way to make it fun. Or make a profit.”
I asked her once if it bothered her that Dad sat in a car most of the day with a woman. She said of all the things that bothered her about my father, him perched in hot broad daylight with a woman who couldn’t figure out how to let go of the dead was low on the list. “You don’t have to keep an eye on sad people much,” she said with the air of someone handing down a commandment. “Sad isn’t dangerous.”
At church, I liked to watch Reverend Scoggins from the second or third pew. Before he began every sermon, he made a big production of pulling his handkerchief from a hidden pocket in his black cassock. He snapped the starched folds out of it and put the cloth to his mouth, like a man wiping away a dab of barbeque sauce. Once he’d cleaned his lips, he closed his eyes and in a sawmill whisper that even the back pew could hear, he’d say, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer.” Then, he gave a slight glance toward heaven or the ceiling and started his sermons. I only understood the most general gist of what he spoke about. Usually about living the right way when you can and asking for forgiveness when you don’t. I realized then I was destined to spend a lot more time in my life looking to be forgiven than doing the right things, which wasn’t so much a depressing thought as it was exhausting. I foresaw myself as a man chasing around somebody or something that would give me a pass for my indiscretions, both purposeful and accidental. But that summer, I had no clue what a decent indiscretion was.
Truth be told, I was addled. I had begun to spend my nights lying in the dark, blanketed by only the hot air, worrying about the nature of heaven, what it looked like, what kind of places folks lived in. Whether they would allow people to sit in air conditioned cars and swap stories. Were there even cars in heaven, for that matter? From what I could tell from Reverend Scoggins, gold was a prominent feature in the afterlife unless you went straight to Hell, which made me wonder if the fact that we did not have an air conditioner was simply a rehearsal for the future, preparing ourselves for the sizzle of eternal flames. Admittedly, I had too much time on my hands that summer, and I wasn’t sure if my friends were concerned with their afterlives, because I never asked them. Me and Lonnie Tisdale and the McElveen brothers talked about girls we’d considered kissing and the size of redbreasts we’d hooked in the Black River, but never once did I ask them about the nature of their souls. It wasn’t the kind of thing that came up by itself.
I did ask my mother. I told her that church made me nervous.
“What do you mean nervous? Does your stomach hurt? Do you make sure you go to the bathroom before services?” she asked. Although she was a nurse and well-practiced in professional and amateur diagnoses, she was convinced every ailment with her children originated with the lack of regular bowel movement.
“It’s more like I can’t sleep and I spend all my time worrying about things after I get back from church,” I said. “Things like hell.”
She glanced out the window across the street, toward the Lincoln. “Like you could tell me anything about worry,” she said. I knew what she meant. No matter how much she insisted Eunice Baxley was harmless, she still wondered what went on in the Lincoln. She’d asked me about it one afternoon, and I told her that Eunice and my dad just talked about wars and dead people. That was it. I didn’t tell her about Eunice’s wandering hand. I could tell she wasn’t convinced. She was over feeling sorry for my father, for his half a stomach and the way he kept shrinking into himself. He’d run out of excuses for his own weaknesses, so these days, she was content to let events drift by, like leaves on the surface of Black River.
“And I worry about dying and everything,” I said trying to pull the conversation back toward me.
“Get used to it,” she said, fanning herself with a dishtowel. For a nurse, she could be pretty harsh inside her own house. “Listen, I got enough worrying all to myself. That’s what church is for. Church is where you go to clear your head. So you just keep sitting there beside me and listen to Scoggins and one day a switch will flip on and you’ll get about half of life figured out. The other half will stay a mystery. Half is about the best you can hope for.” She mopped her face with the towel. “Go see if that fan is turned up all the way, would you? It’s hot as hell in here.”
She smiled when she said that. She knew what she was doing. That night, it was all I could do not to think about burning up eternally.
The next day was Sunday, which makes sense now—that I would spend a night tossing and turning, then drive off to church, fuzzy-headed and anxious again. Reverend Scoggins performed his little handkerchief drama, then preached about King David and Bathsheba. I tried to do what my mother suggested, let a switch flip, let half of the world come clear in my head, but it didn’t seem to be happening. Scoggins appeared to enjoy reciting the story of a king’s fall from grace. He had the same expression on his face people in town flashed when they bragged about stealing gas from McGill’s Esso station—a guilt-free smile that oozed satisfaction. Scoggins’ face glowed down to us, and I watched my mother fighting to stay awake. I wondered if she’d had trouble sleeping too.
I do recall at one point, David attempts to convince Bathsheba’s husband to come back from the war and lay with his wife. (My mother glanced toward me when Scoggins said “lay with,” and I nodded up at her because my friends and I had already discussed the cryptic words in the Bible, a language not unlike the adult code we’d begun to crack. She knew I knew.)
David, from where I sat, kept digging himself a deeper and deeper hole, and God watched every shovelful. My head bobbed and bobbed. I did my best to fight sleep, to listen to Scoggins’ words, but they turned into a lullaby somehow, and right when the reverend got to the part where David asked for forgiveness, I couldn’t keep my head on my shoulders, and the last thing I remember was a blast of gold light that flashed across my eyes when I fell sideways and cracked my forehead square on the pew.
IN HER FLAT nurse’s monotone, my mother said I bled relatively little for such a big split on my head. “I’ve seen worse,” she said. “Your skin is very thin there, you know.” My mother didn’t realize that toppling over in the pew—and interrupting church for a half hour while they carried me out and wiped up the blood—had scrambled the thoughts flitting around my head. I’d heard about religious ecstasy. I looked it up in the library. And I knew from my research that most people were wide awake when they had their strange, religious spells. I’d been out cold. But while I was out, David and Bathsheba and Eunice and my old man and Eddie Baxley and God and my mother jumbled together. Everyone’s story became my single story, buzzing in my head like a pissed off bee in a jar. My mother told me the first thing I said when I floated toward consciousness was: “What did God do to daddy when he came back from the war to lay with Bathsheba? Did King David make it back from Korea?”
She said Reverend Scoggins stood above me, and the two of them chalked my nonsense up to a nasty, enlarging bump on the head, at least until I looked at Scoggins clear-eyed and said, “Does everybody get forgiven in the end?” She told me when I said that to him, the blood drained from his face a little, like he’d been asked a question he couldn’t answer. “Boy needs some rest,” he said, and he went back to the pulpit to finish off David and Bathsheba.
I wobbled some when I walked, propped against my mother’s side all the way to the car, and she opened the windows so I could get as much air as possible on the ride home. My forehead was wrapped in a piece of purple cloth that felt silky to the touch and smelled slightly of stale cologne. I’m not sure when she made her plan, but my mother didn’t turn right into our driveway, instead went left and pulled across the grass and up the slope and threw the car in park, right beside the Lincoln.
My father lowered the driver’s window and looked through the slice of space. “How was church?” he asked.
“Your son had a moment,” she said. “Open that back door for me. It’s too damn hot in the house for him right now.” She helped me out of the car. “And if you say anything about needing a quarter, I’ll beat you senseless.” My father jumped out of the Lincoln, flustered as if he suddenly had houseguests he hadn’t prepared for. She gave me a slight nudge into the back seat, and it felt like it always did, like ducking into a big walk-in cooler. My hand made its way instinctively toward my pocket to search for a quarter that wasn’t there.
“Hello, Eunice,” my mother said, her voice caked with sugary sarcasm. “I hope you’re having yet another productive day on earth.” To me, she said, “When you feel better, walk on home. We’re the house right across the street. The one you can see real good from the front seat of this damn car.” I waited for her to slam the door, but she held back and just eased it shut, like a quiet taunt.
For a solid minute or so, the silence blew around us until I decided Eunice and my old man were waiting for me to open the discussions. “I passed out in church,” I said.
“What’s that ribbon on your head?” my father asked.
“That thing the preacher drapes around his neck sometimes,” I said back. “They needed a bandage. I was bleeding for a while.”
Eunice spoke, her voice more ragged than usual. “How you feeling now?” She didn’t turn in her seat, just continued to stare out the window. Before I could answer, she said, “Why there goes Laurice Reeves on her bicycle. She doesn’t look like she went to church.”
I didn’t know how she could tell at this distance that somebody had not attended services. “I’m okay, I guess,” I said, feeling a little neglected. To be honest, I hadn’t taken inventory of my faculties. My head didn’t hurt all that much, not more than a little throb every now and then behind my eyes. I couldn’t explain it (and I can’t to this day), but I felt different somehow, like a bang on the head had shaken something loose. I felt as though the person I was before church was a little bit of a stranger this afternoon. I wondered if this was what my mother meant when she told me changes were coming. I didn’t realize they would come this fast. Or that I’d have to smack my head on a church pew to bring them about. But something had indeed changed.
“Me and Eunice were just talking about the rise of communism,” my father said.
“Bullshit,” I told him. He snapped his head around.
“What did you say?” he hissed, then glanced at Eunice to see if she’d heard.
The purple bandage on my head draped one of my eyes and I tugged it up so I could look straight at him. “I said that’s all bullshit. You aren’t talking about communism. You’re just talking about anything so you can sit in the cold with somebody who will at least listen to you.” I pulled at the bandage again. “I speak the truth, Father.”
He stared at me like he was studying a map of land he’d never set foot in. “I think you better mind that tongue of yours.”
The end of the purple bandage hung off the side of my head, long enough that I could grab the end of it and dab at my mouth, which I did, and quickly followed with, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, Daddy.”
“We aren’t doing anything wrong here,” Eunice said. “Your father is just helping me get beyond Eddie.”
I’ll bet I’d never said more than fifty words to Eunice Baxley until that afternoon, when I told her Eddie was happy where he was, happier than he’d ever been before. She winced at that. “I think you ought to cut your ties with Eddie and live out your earthly days in peace,” I said.
I should confess, I had no idea where my vocabulary was coming from. It was like a typewriter in my head was spitting out sentences through my mouth. I was surprised at what I was saying and who I was saying it to, but I liked it. It felt good, like the air conditioning.
“Your mother put you up to this,” my dad said. He opened his door. “I’ll set her straight.” He started to ease out into the brightness.
“She worries about you, you know,” I told him, and that stopped him in his tracks, which I knew was going to happen. I remember smiling at the realization I could tell the future to an extent.
“What are you talking about?” The door was still open and the cold air fought with the outside heat, and it was losing the battle.
“She worries about your stomach and how it seems to be getting worse. She worries about you spending all your time in a Lincoln with another woman. She worries about money. She worries about me and Eli and what’s going to happen to all of us. She spends a lot of time sitting in the living room worrying.” I folded my hands and laid them in my lap.
Eunice spoke up first. “Like I said, we weren’t doing anything. I’m too old for your father anyway.”
“Be quiet, Eunice,” my father said, then looked at me. “And you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You’re just a kid. Act like one.” His eyes came back then. They weren’t as dark and buried in their sockets. I don’t know if it was the way the bright light from the sunlight hit them, but I saw them clearly for the first time in what seemed like years. And I could see that he was afraid in his eyes, not afraid of me, but afraid of things changing. That’s why he liked Eunice and the Lincoln. It was the same thing every time, every day on the hill during the hot part of the day. He could depend on that, on something staying the same. And he could hide from everything else that shimmered in the heat on the other side of the windshield.
“I’m going back to the house,” I said and climbed out of the car. I adjusted the bandage on my head. The place where my forehead split was beginning to throb with a little more desperation. My father didn’t move. Eunice reached over and cranked up the fan on the AC a little.
“You need to stay away from church,” my father said. I stuck my hands in my pockets and shrugged my shoulders. I felt the edges of a quarter I didn’t know I had. It had appeared like some kind of summer miracle. I didn’t hand it to my father. I tossed it toward his open window, and he fumbled with the catch. The quarter disappeared into tall grass that needed cutting. “I’m going home,” I said. “‘Bye, Eunice.”
I walked all the way to McGill’s with my bandage wrapped around my forehead, like I was marching home wounded from war. The Esso station was between my house and the river, downhill most of the way. When I started out, I thought I would be a little light-headed, because of the heat and the throbbing across my forehead, but the closer I got to the station, the better I felt about things.
Emerson McGill liked to open his station right after church for people who wanted to fill their tanks for the upcoming week. He probably figured he could pump enough gas and sell enough Pepsi to make it worth his while. I stayed on the sidewalk the whole time while I walked, looking forward for cracks in the cement. I don’t remember seeing another person the whole trip.
The front door of the station was wide open. Mr. McGill sat behind a glass counter of candy and cigarettes, fanning himself with a bulletin from the Baptist Church. I could see the line drawing of the big church building passing back and forth in front of his face. In the open back door, he’d propped a huge warehouse fan that sucked air from behind the station and blew it into the tiny office space. On the wall, clipboards stuffed with orders and invoices fluttered like wind chimes. “You got a sash on your head, son,” Mr. McGill said.
“I had an accident in church,” I said. His coffee mug sat close by his free hand. He stopped fanning and took a sip.
“Ain’t we all,” he said.
I didn’t know how to answer that, so I launched into my proposition. I asked Mr. McGill if he’d noticed that he was missing a lot more gas than he was selling.
“Well, my numbers don’t always jive,” he said, waving at the clipboards, “but I was never good at arithmetic. I figured something was wrong with the pumps.”
I told him that I wasn’t going to name names because that wouldn’t be the Christian thing to do. (I believe I might have made that up. I am not sure that turning in thieves is precisely the Christian thing to do.) But I said that I could solve his mathematics-and-pump dilemma for the low, low price of five dollars a week.
He sipped again. “Let me get this straight. I’ll pay you five bucks every week and give you the keys to the pumps, just so you can make sure they’s turned off,” he said, “and I’m going to make money with this operation?”
“You’re giving away more than five dollars’ worth of gas every week,” I said. “I mean, do the math, Mr. McGill.” That might have been mean, but I was reaching for a dramatic effect.
He took a longer sip from his coffee mug and reached underneath the candy display. He pulled out a leather wallet the size of a paperback book and fished a five dollar bill from among the slips of scrap paper and receipts.
“Here. It’s worth a five to see if you’re a con man or a genius.” He slid the bill to me, then dug through a drawer in the cash register for the pump keys. They didn’t really look like keys to me. He walked me outside and showed me how they worked. “It never occurred to me that people would actually steal gasoline,” he said, shaking his head. “People aren’t right in the head sometimes.” Later that same afternoon, I rode my bicycle down the easy hill toward the river to the Esso station and clicked off the pumps just before the evening settled in. I made money that summer.
The Lincoln ran out of gas sometime in July. I’d like to say it was around Independence Day, but that would more than likely be a lie. I watched my father ease the car off the hill toward the gas station one night, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to pump any fuel into the tank. He pulled the car back into its customary spot a few minutes later, and the next day, he and Eunice abandoned their daily rituals when the engine idled for the last time. I knew he was too cheap and broke to pay for his comfort, and Eunice was too mixed up by grief to understand why the Lincoln’s engine was suddenly dead. In two weeks, the grass and weeds crept up the tires and from my house you could see the brown summer dust layering the windshield of Eddie Baxley’s Lincoln.
My father started spending his days on our back porch, chasing a square of shade that ran during the day from west to east. I’m not sure if my mother was happy about him being around, but I did hear the two of them talking more. I ended up with a little scar that runs diagonal across my forehead. Not exactly stigmata, but I do find myself touching it each time I walk inside a church.
