Wolf Whistle (15 page)

Alice played her share of jacks. She bounced that hard
little red rubber ball. She did her onesies and her twosies, and all the rest. She jumped rope, and double-rope. She knew all the chants.
Ching-chong Chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.
She cut out about a million paper dolls, and dressed them up in cut-out clothes, which she was handy at folding back the little white tabs on, so they wrapped all the way around and out of sight, and so the clothes fitted snug and true, even the ones she cut out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. She made up stories about her dolls, the boys who loved them, the fine cities they visited, or lived in.

Alice loved Little LuLu comic books, especially Little LuLu's private diary, which was always written on the middle two pages of the book.

And there was other stuff she liked that wasn't girl-stuff, not exactly. She loved the light, and the air, of the Mississippi Delta, her home, and the woods, and the fields. Partly she loved them because her daddy loved them, and they were the only things he knew how to share with her without making a joke. Swarms of bees, and honey trees, red clover to the horizon, and white clover, and honeysuckle, and yellow bitterweed, and brindle cows standing chest-deep in black water.

Alice's daddy was not a hunter, and not a farmer, but he took her out in the Delta wilderness to look at the things hunters looked at, and into the fields to look at the things
that farmers saw, if hunters and farmers ever really saw the details of their rich lives.

She saw turtles on a log, lazybones, sleeping in the sun, how you gonna git your day's work done; she saw water moccasins on a low branch, all tongue and cotton mouth, wide open with interest in the sound of her voice, as if she were sister to the beauty of slime, and with no evil intent; she saw wild pigs snuffling beneath forest oaks, and their piglets, pink, hairless babydolls, feeding decently, serenely, with delicacy and good manners, on acorns fat with pulp and sweet as apples; she saw deer in the morning, with tails like big white flags and antler racks like rocking chairs for children, and she looked upon their still-warm beds, where spotted fawn had suckled the sleepy doe, and the nervous buck slept with one eye open wide; once she saw a brown bear, old man with a purple tongue, eating dewberries on the edge of the woods, careful to avoid the thorns of the wild and fragrant rose bushes entwined in the same fruit, in the same field.

Maybe this is the reason she fell in love with Dr. Dust, though he was twice her age and as impossible to get close to as her daddy. He looked at things in the same way as her daddy—other things, words mainly, not woods and fields, not bears, but the same, and he showed them to her, those words, poems, as if they were merely wild angels, like the ones she saw feeding quietly at the edge of the woods, in
the morning sun, on dewberries, when she was a girl. He made the small world around them extravagant with the praise of words.

The morning she saw the bear, she was with her daddy, of course. She was twelve, maybe thirteen.

She said, “It's like an angel.”

They stood a while longer, with the sun rising still, rosy in the east, and they kept on watching from the place by the fence where they had been standing for a long time, by then, there in the darkness, since long before the sun showed itself at all.

In a few moments the bear stopped feeding and stood on all fours for a minute, and then sat back on its big old butt, and scratched behind one ear with its hind foot at a flea, like a big lazy dog.

Her daddy said, “It could kill us with scorn alone.”

Alice was thinking these thoughts as she tried to sleep in her bed at Uncle Runt's house. She adjusted her pillow. She gave one real big deep sigh. She lay awake long enough to hear that the rain had let up, maybe even stopped.

She thought about Glenn Gregg in his pitiful home.

She thought of her Uncle Runt. She understood the tragedy of his life.

She thought about Dr. Dust. She imagined that he made vulgar jokes to her in front of his wife.

Her bed was so comfortable, even in the horror of what

she must have sensed, out there in the darkness, on the spillway.

She went back to sleep. There was nothing else she could do, once she understood the futility of magic to change anything of importance in the world.

I
N THE
summertime, when a nuisance of pecans began to fall off the trees like hail and when pecan sap gummed up windshields and stripped paint from the Chevrolets and Mercuries and DeSotos and Kaisers, and when fig milk poured out of the stems of fallen fruit, Roy Dale was always walking behind the yellow-painted power mower, with a Briggs and Stratton engine that rattle-rattle-rattled through his hands and arms and in his head, and that he bought on time from Mr. Gibson at the Western Auto store.

He leaned into the mower, with his arms and his back and breathed the fragrances of Bermuda and lespedeza and Johnson grass and crab and nut, cutting swaths and then turning and lapping two wheels over the last swath and cutting back down the yard in the opposite direction, of half the yards in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi.

He was dreaming of escape.

To Roy Dale, the lawnmower was freedom from Mississippi. It was dollars—for an illegal quart of beer, sometimes, or a pack of Camels, or an occasional rubber to blow up.

But not just money. Not really money at all, in fact. The yellow-painted Briggs and Stratton lawnmower was a loud-noise silence from which to dream.

Roy Dale suspected that Mississippi was beautiful. He wasn't sure. He didn't have anything to compare it to. He hadn't even ever been out of the Delta.

He had heard about red-clay banks along rivers in the hills, clay as red as blood, somebody told him, colored red with iron in the dirt.

He had heard about deep forests of blue spruce in the hills that, when you walked through them, smelled like sweetened turpentine. Were they really blue?

He had heard about the Gulf Coast, too—white sands, and palm trees, and coconuts, pretty girls in two-piece swimming suits, and green-felt poker tables, and slot machines, and striptease dancers, and comedians right up on a stage telling jokes to you, and wide blue water, stretching out to Ship Island, and Cuba, and Lord knows where-all.

Roy Dale was not good with directions, but he knew north and south and east and west. He had these directions down pat. Behind his lawnmower, with its rattle-rattle-rattle and barrump-barrump-barrump, and with a fragrance of green, fresh-cut grass, and of gasoline and hot motor oil, in his nostrils, Roy Dale would think, All right, west, over there where the sun is going down—that's Texas, that's California.

Cows and gold mines. Cattle drives and stampedes, miners, forty-niners, and my darling Clementine. Coyotes and mesas and motherlodes. He didn't know much, but west was one thing he did know.

These were the things Roy Dale thought about in the summertime, and even in the fall, on Saturdays, when rain wasn't filling up the ditches, and backing up into sewers, and sending big snakes up into the porcelain toilet bowls on the first floors of houses, and making loblollies of every spot of available earth, and even then, sometimes, he thought about these things, like today, this late night, in his room alone in bed, fingering the fletching of an arrow from the quiver the coach let him bring home before practice on Monday morning.

S
OLON WAS
leaning down over the steering wheel, trying to see where he was going in all this rain. He was sitting up on the front edge of his seat like a child, trying to keep the El Camino from slipping off in a ditch. The headlights were poking out through the rain, the rain was drumming on the roof and in the truck bed.

Solon said, “Once we get up to the gravel, we'll be able to make a little better time, visibility won't be so bad.”

They drove on a while longer, in silence.

Solon said, “I ain't never driving down this slick durn road again.”

Then Solon said, “Here we go! Here's the gravel! All right! Man! I thought we's lost there for a minute.”

He pulled the truck up onto the gravel and turned left, headed out into Runnymede.

He said, “Well, shoot! That's a relief. Shit far.”

Solon could lean back into the backrest a little, now that they had made the high road. He could see better, relax a little. The windshield wipers were going zoop zoop zoop.

Solon said, “I'd done got myself a little tense there for a minute.”

Solon was able to get up a little speed now, on the better
road. The sound of the wet gravel beneath the tires was like bacon sizzling in a frying pan.

On the better road, Solon didn't mind taking his hand off the wheel for a couple of seconds. He reached into his back pocket and took out a crumpled white handkerchief and handed it over.

He said, “It ain't too durn clean.”

Solon got to the spillway and stopped. The lights shone across the water, which was high now, on account of the rain. Lake water had covered the road, which was also the high water dam, and was spilling over it into the gum swamp in a long white line of frothy water.

Solon said, “I wonder can I drive across this durn thing,'

They sat in the truck, with the motor running. The water poured over the spillway like music. The headlights were like long yellow planks in the darkness, stretched across the spillway to the other side.

Solon said, “I heard this is a good place to fish, the spillway.”

Solon waved off the bloody handkerchief.

He said, “Just keep it.”

They drove on for a while, across Runnymede.

He said, “You ever go fishing?”

Solon imagined fish beneath the dam, silent and silver in the dark.

He took a breath and let it out. He said, “I'm always
thinking I'm going to go fishing sometime myself, and then I don't.”

He said, “I seen all them fishing poles back at the house. Uncle, he got plenty of fishing poles, don't he? What's Uncle do, cut him some cane poles out in the brake, dry them out in the rafters?”

Dark night, and the rain kept on drumming on the roof of the El Camino, but Solon thought it wont such a bad night for a drive, for sitting out in a car with a boy and listening to the falling water on the tin roof.

He said, “What do you reckon your Uncle would charge me for a good fishing pole? You and me, maybe we'll get together, go fishing some time, what'da you think? Wet us a couple of hooks, you know.”

Solon reached in his pocket and took out the thousand dollars, the big fat roll of new bills.

He said, “Reckon that ought to be enough for two fishing poles?” He held it out for inspection.

He laughed a quiet laugh.

He said, “This ought to buy us a couple of pretty good poles, oughtn't it? First-rate fishing poles. Throw in a Prince Albert can full of nightcrawlers to boot, don't you reckon?”

Solon rolled down his window and sat for a couple of minutes holding the money. Then he flung the roll of bills
out into the wind and fain and rolled the window back up again.

The bills went every which-away at first, and then the rain sogged them down, out on the road and in the ditch and some of them blew into the spillway and over the dam, and out into the water of the lake.

He had a second thought, then, so he rolled his window back down, and took the .25 caliber pistol from out the front of his pants and slung it out the window, too, backhand, out in the rain. No telling where it landed, somewhere off the road, someplace, or in the ditch, or out in the field.

The water was pouring over the dam, making its musical sound, different from the rain on the roof, though that sound was like music, too.

Solon said, “Do you reckon I could drive across the top of this thing?”

He rolled his window back up again.

Solon said, “Trouble is, that spillway current is so durn strong, it's liable to push this little truck right off in Roebuck Lake.”

They sat for a while longer without talking.

He said, “You know what I ought to of did, don't you? I ought to of insisted that he find that slut wife of his and give me the Cadillac, instead of this candyass contraption.
This durn El Camino ain't all it's cracked up to be, once the novelty's done wore off. That's my own personal opinion.”

A long time passed, then. Solon looked at the dashboard lights. They were green and comfortable-looking, they made Solon consider that his life was in good order. Good oil pressure. Radiator, not a bit of overheating. Fuel—well. The fuel was a little low, not bad, though. Solon hadn't thought to check his gas gauge, back at Sims and Hill. He could have told Hydro, “Fill 'er up,” if he'd of thought about it. Look like now he was running a little low, nothing to worry about.

He said, “You know another thing I never did that I always wanted to? Before I die, I wish I could dig me up some fresh peanuts out the ground and soak them in brine, real salty, you know, boil them good, and then roast them somehow, like on that iron stove in your Auntee's kitchen. I don't know why digging up my own fresh peanuts always appealed to me. It's just one of them durn things.”

The music of the spillway water in the swamp sounded like soft, faraway plucking on the strings of the guitars of the blues singers on Red's front porch.

Solon said, “I'm pretty much committed to crossing this durn thing. I ought to just go on and do it. I don't know what I'm waiting on.”

He laughed again, his soft laugh.

He kept looking out into the darkness, along the plane
made by the headlights, across the spillway, towards a barn that was still too far away to see.

Solon said, “See, I always kind of thought I would take my boy fishing, someday, the one what got burnt up. Two cane poles with bream hooks, cat-gut line, and red-and-white plastic bobbers, little piece of lead shot. Maybe dig some worms, trap some roaches, seine some minnows.”