Читать книгу False River - Stinson Carter - Страница 7

Andrew left the mechanical remnants of his old summer landscaping business in a storage unit when he went down to New Orleans for college. He’d intended to revive his operation over summers back from school, but seven years and two degrees later, he still hasn’t been back for anything other than a few Christmases and family funerals.

Cam calls Andrew in New Orleans for the key to the padlock and the unit number at the storage place.

“Hey man,” says Cam, working-in an unaccustomed familiarity to soften the fact that he doesn’t even remember the last time they talked, and that even now he’s only calling to ask a favor.

“Oh… Hey.” Andrew’s voice flattens out as soon as he realizes it’s Cam on the line, like he was expecting a friend but got a telemarketer.

“How’s it goin’?” asks Cam.

“Fine. You?”

“Alright.”

“Mom said you got into Tech.”

“Everybody gets into Tech.”

“What’re you taking?”

“Just some bullshit.”

“How’s being back home?”

“Livin’ with mom’s killing me.”

“You’ve been sayin’ that since you were ten.”

“I’ve been meaning it since I was ten.”

“Why don’t you just get your own place?”

“Money.”

“Then get a job.”

“I will. I want to do some landscaping.”

“Do you know anything about landscaping?”

“I know how to mow lawns.”

“Walked right into that one didn’t I?”

“Into what?”

“Into why you called me for the first time in a year,” says Andrew, his voice veering towards wounded.

“You know I didn’t just call you to get your lawn mower, Andy,” says Cam, “I want your edger and your Weedeater, too.” Cam grins into the receiver.

There’s a silence on the other end of the line that Cam recognizes immediately. Andrew has always seemed to hate, more than anything else about Cam, his dry joking way of handling Andrew’s feelings.

Cam didn’t experience the worst of their father’s alcoholism and the breakdown of their parents’ marriage, so he never really earned the right to joke about the family problems to Andrew as often as he did. From time-to-time though, Cam had tried to talk straight with him. “You know what your problem is…” Cam would say when he’d find Andrew sitting on his bed, teary-eyed from a cold exchange with their dad. “Your problem is you let stuff get to you.” This would usually send Andrew further into whatever hole he was in, and it would take him a good several minutes to pull himself together enough to shoot back with his usual whispered response of “You know what your problem is, Cam? You don’t let anything get to you.” Cam never really thought that was much of a comeback, and even wondered why he shouldn’t take it as a compliment.

“No, but seriously, man…” says Cam. “It’s nice to talk to you.”

“Is this talking?”

“What else is it?”

Cam listens to the static of his mother’s cheap cordless phone for a few seconds. Andrew eventually breaks the silence and tells Cam he was planning to sell off all the equipment any day now, then lets Cam plead a little for the temporary use of a mower, weed-eater, edger, and the trailer to haul them. Cam notices in Andrew’s cocky reluctance that the more time Andrew has spent out on his own, the more pride he’s taken in the fact that his boyhood scars have driven him to things like landscaping businesses and law school while Cam’s relatively calm childhood has driven him to relatively nothing. Cam listens to a few strict rules about how to use the mower without threatening its resale value, and then they talk their way around a proper goodbye.

Cam doesn’t have any way to tow the trailer, so he fixes up Munna’s Pontiac Chieftain and fits it with a hitch. The Pontiac has lain dusty and empty in her garage for years, next to a small hanging birdcage that has also been empty since a flying squirrel named Lila died tragically of food poisoning in 1961 after eating Munna’s three-day-old Oysters Rockefeller.

Munna spent her husband’s banking riches on decades of round-the-clock nurses; staring through cateye glasses at screaming televangelists, sipping sixteen-ounce cans of Schlitz malt liquor and puffing Camel cigarettes through a four-inch ivory holder. The Chieftain is about the only thing other than the house that she hasn’t had to let go of to cover the cost of her slow dying. It’s got a V-8 that can still break a hundred, whitewall tires, and enough chrome to leave sunspots in your eyes on a clear day. But the best thing about it is the lighted Indian chief hood ornament that comes alive with the headlights.

Cam’s mother gives him a list of Andrew’s old clients from memory, and he finds as many as he can in the phone book. Fortunately, their memory of Andrew is stronger than any gossip they may have ever heard about Cam, and he’s hired by enough of them to fill up his free time.

The work itself isn’t nearly as interesting as the things he notices about the people he works for. His first day on the job, he gets thirsty and heads to the front porch on an instinct borrowed from the black yardmen he used to watch working at Munna’s house. But there isn’t any water waiting for him on the porch and there never will be. It doesn’t take him long to realize why not, but the reason rolls around in his head for the rest of the day.

Black men mowing lawns in the South get ice water in jelly jars with missing lids. Any jar that becomes separated from its lid between annual jelly batches enters the final phase in its life cycle––a cycle that begins with boiled sterilization, is given life with gelatin, sugar and summer berries, matures with Christmas ribbons, and ends with black hydration. The jars are always laid out on the front steps of the house, timed to appear just before the men have a chance to give that dreaded knock and stand there, with pungent sweat and timid eyes, and say “Sawry te be botherin ye’ Ma’am, but mah boys and ah’s thirsty an’ that hose water’s too hot for drinkin’.”

Their employer had allowed this knock to come once, as a young housewife. But even if she was touched by the fact that he tried the hose before coming to the door, when she went to the kitchen something in her still made her reach for the cabinet under the sink instead of the one above it. She didn’t bother herself with the question of whether this little move was being made by women in houses all around her, as it had been by their mothers and grandmothers, and that it wasn’t all that far from the separate drinking fountains at the public pool she’d seen as a kid and took up arms against in college. And so she’d deliver a tray of those jars to the men on the porch with the same smile she got the time her Junior League served Thanksgiving dinner at the downtown mission.

Instead of jelly jars on the front steps, Cam is invited inside for sweet tea or lemonade. The rich South Highlands housewife––which covers every one of his clients––sits with him at the breakfast table by the kitchen door and says “It’s so hot outside, I just don’t know how you stand it.” And Cam drags the side of his hand––its veins still plump from the days work––across his sweaty, sun-darkened forehead and says “You get used to it after a while.” Then he finishes the move with a durable blue-collar grin. So long as the heat holds, this little exchange is usually good for a ten-dollar tip. Which then buys her a hug of thanks at the back door. The women always lay a hand on the sweaty middle of his back, and he’s never seen a single one of them wipe their hand afterwards.

Cam finishes another such exchange after a Saturday of cutting grass, and heads back home to get ready for the night. He idles the Pontiac into his mother’s apartment complex and lifts a few fingers off the steering wheel in a lazy wave to the kids straddling bicycles by the bank of mailboxes at the entrance. The kids giggle and point at the old car and trailer no matter how many times they see them. They cluster around the entrance on their bikes every Saturday––the youngest with training wheels and the oldest with Huffy mountain bikes. They watch the highway from here like puppies watch the sidewalk from a pet store window. Waiting for their dads to pick them up for their two days a week. Waiting for the megaphone music box of the ice cream truck. Waiting for their single mothers to come home from day shifts at the check stands of strip mall outlets and superstores. Waiting for a fistfight or a game of doctor. Waiting for puberty and driver’s licenses and sex and alcohol, and for life and time to either bring them something interesting or just take them away from here. Cam knows they’ve got a good thing going, but its nothing they would hear at their age.

He parks the Pontiac in the visitor lot, taking one spot for the car and another spot behind it for the trailer. Hand-written notes used to appear under his wipers on a weekly basis for this offense. They started in good faith: “Please… my friend needs a place to park… one vehicle per spot… thank you.” But they eventually deteriorated into cussing assaults on the trailer, then on the profession of lawn mowing, and then they bottomed-out on some bizarre kind of racism-by-association: “Just ‘cause you have a nigger job don’t mean you have to park like one,” read one note. Cam saved them all in his glove compartment and started putting old ones under his wipers whenever he’d leave his car, just so people would think somebody already gave him a piece of their mind. This more or less stopped the notes, so it passed for a solution in Cam’s mind.

He retrieves a note from the glove compartment about someone’s girlfriend having to park on the side of the highway because of him, and tucks it under the wiper, face-up for all prospective note writers to see. Then he walks to the apartment and finds his mother outside on her knees. She’s dug up the one-foot by four-foot flowerbeds on either side of the front door. Fresh blue violets in the bed of Cam and Andrew’s old red Radio Flyer wait to be planted.

“Need some help?” asks Cam.

“No, I like doing it,” she says.

As Cam reaches the door, his mother looks up from her spade to make sure he takes his shoes off. He kicks them off by the doormat and walks inside in his socks.

Cam’s usual Saturday night routine involves digging through his mother’s fridge for dinner, then showering off the day’s sweat and grass clippings, and then un-hitching the trailer to take the Pontiac out on the town.

The only friends his own age that aren’t off at State are Hollis Lawson and Billy Pratt, so he’s forced to spend more time with the two of them than he’d like to. Hollis is taking “time off” from college after flunking out of SMU midway through his junior year. Billy is taking classes on and off at LSUS, the Shreveport satellite of Louisiana State University.

The friendship with Hollis is based on the fact that he and Cam went to vacation bible school together as kids, and reunited in their high school detention hall. The only difference now is that the detention hall is a pool hall, and they go by choice for cutting up in life. The friendship with Billy centers on a mushroom trip at a campground on Cross Lake, where they met at a keg party during high school and talked till dawn about the universal connectedness of things.

Even though the friendship currency earned in vacation bible school and a soul-searching mushroom trip has long been spent, the three of them still meet up at the Filling Station on Saturday nights. They line up quarters on one rail of a pool table and beers on the other, and by the time both rails are bare, they settle for the meager fraternity of a shared need for women.

For this, they usually migrate downtown to the riverfront. Either to the dark, velvet-cushioned lounges––where South Highlands brats celebrate their ID’s turning legal by trying to get to New York City or LA with watermelon martinis and ambient music before the lights come up; or they go to the Saddle Ridge in Bossier––where mechanical bulls and Vodka Bulls graze on a plywood pasture with shouting Barksdale airmen and Revlon-smeared country girls.

Cam mills over the night while he eats a Louis Rich turkey and mayonnaise sandwich over the kitchen counter. On his way out of the kitchen to a much-needed shower, he gives a dismissive look to the picture of him in his marine dress blues on the fridge. But his eyes snag on what’s pinned under a magnet beside it––a large, gold-bordered wedding invitation that has been up on the fridge for weeks. He goes outside and interrupts his mother’s gardening.

“Is it the fourth?” asks Cam.

“Yes,” she says.

“I thought you were goin’ to that wedding.”

“Melanie couldn’t go with me, her father’s not doing so well.”

“Oh,” says Cam. “Just saw the invitation, thought you might’ve forgot.”

“No,” she says.

Cam goes back inside to shower, wondering why anybody cares about weddings outside of their own close circles.

But his mother’s floral distraction from her disappointment at not going proves that weddings aren’t just about the newlyweds. They must be about women wanting something to get pretty for and men wanting something to get drunk for. Or about old women remembering their better days through young couples’ happiness, and old men remembering their better days through young brides’ figures. Like most things people do in groups, it must be about doing things for yourself that you need other people to participate in.

As he leaves the bathroom in a towel, he watches his mother through the living room window, on her hands and knees in the late afternoon sun, emptying the Radio Flyer’s colorful payload into the tiny garden that neighborhood dogs use as a latrine. Nearer to him is a Blockbuster bag on the coffee table, which also means there’s a pint of his mother’s favorite mint chip ice cream in the freezer. He steps into the kitchen to look at the invitation again, then goes out onto the front doorstep.

“Cam, don’t let the neighbors see you like that!”

He backs up and covers his towel-wrapped body with the door.

“You want to go?” asks Cam.

“It’s too late.”

“The reception doesn’t start for another forty-five minutes.”

“I’m a mess,” she says, looking down at the soil-blackened thighs of her Chic jeans.

“Let’s go,” says Cam, “You have time.”

“Both of us?” she asks.

Cam shrugs.

“You can wear Andrew’s old suit again… the one you wore for graduation,” she says, with sudden eagerness, “You looked so handsome in it.”

“Where is it?”

“Back of your closet in the Dillard’s bag. I’ll press a shirt for you if you need me to.”

“No, I’ll do it,” says Cam.

She hops up and drags the Radio Flyer back around to the side yard. Then she hurries into the house and disappears into her bedroom. Seconds later, her bathroom shower starts running.

A thought comes into Cam’s head that he’d rather not have there. It’s about himself as a little boy, maybe five years old, standing in her bathroom and noticing a dark triangle of pubic hair through her fogged glass shower door. For years, that triangle was a symbol of women and sexuality that he would uncover the meaning of when he grew up. But by the time he was old enough to be naked with women, the whole lot of them had decided to do away with that triangle of hair almost entirely. He never did uncover the mystery of women that this triangle represented to him, and it now seems as elusive as the hair that symbolized it. He pushes the thought out of his head as he digs into the Dillard’s bag in his closet and pulls out the white twill dress shirt and gray pinstripe suit that have been on loan from the wardrobe of Andrew Daltry since Cam’s high school graduation.

Cam sets up the ironing board in the kitchen and presses his shirt to near military specs. Then he buttons the hot cotton up to his neck and goes back to his room for the suit. There’s a high school commencement program folded in half in the inside pocket. It still smells like it did that day, three years ago, when he stuffed it in there through the front of his Josten’s acetate gown as he and his classmates filed up to the podium on the football field to smile over diplomas they’d never look at again and shake hands with a headmaster they’d never speak to again. He wonders where his diploma is now, as he drops the program into his bathroom trashcan.