Swinging Through Dixie Page 2

  Hubbard has not seen this errant, supernut child—for to his mind child she remains—since she appeared of a sudden three years ago for his 84th birthday, and, as suddenly, disappeared, removed, Grey and others claim, by a helicopter landing in the dead of night on the high-school baseball field.

  “What does that gal of yours do, Hubbard?”

  “Nigh as I can determine she’s a spy.”

  “Ours or theirs?”

  “Ours. Damn you.”

  While his own body falls apart daily, those of his sons’ decompose in whatever field it was the pleasure of foreign wars to leave them. Today he has hobbled in for breakfast on feet dead to all except a numb, useless tingling, to be directed into the hot, not-that-busy kitchen, to find slumped on a stool the girl, the woman, he has known a sizeable chunk of her life, little of it he would call praiseworthy.

  “You!” he says. “What the devil are you up to now?”

  It is Essie Valentine Peterson—now, so to speak, Essie Valentine Grey, though she denies it.

  Essie is hunched over double, her legs slung over through and around the legs and rungs of the stool, in that peculiar manner he’s noticed women have for address of a peculiar situation. And it is peculiar, for Essie is not one usually prone to tears. She is going full steam now, cheeks spotty, eyes as though dipped in red-eye gravy, wringing herself one way and another, gulping for breath, emitting odd snorting sounds, fusillades they might be called, a bleating reminiscent of a lurching locomotive not built to carry the heavy load of cars latched to it. At any rate that is Hubbard’s thought as he approaches her in wary resignation. “Been like that since she come in,” he hears someone, one of the cooks, the bearded one, say, “I reckon Grey must of be come home.”

  “Must of be.”

  “If he don’t kill her first I reckon she will kill him.”

  “Hush,” Hubbard said to them. “You don’t want to go giving her ideas.”

  “If Grey was in that conflagration out by State Line she’s been saved the trouble.”

  “Slick says not a soul was in that car. You can count on Slick—”

  “Not me.”

  “—to git his facts straight.”

  “Slick has got more bullshit in his craw than a dump truck can haul.”

  “Slick?”

  “You must be thinking of that dust-up Slick got into over at the prison farm when the woman come to visit her man got holt of Slick instead. A broom closet, I heard, and the man chasing both Slick and the woman with the same broom he used sweeping the yard.”

  “Slick?”

  “So the tower guard gits off a shot and who is it falls down dead?”

  “Who?”

  “The guard. He’s so full of hisself from firing that gun he falls daredevil outen’ the tower kersplat onto a body of mud.”

  Essie was not listening. She had clearly left home in a hurry: in bare feet, dressed in ugly red-dot pajamas over which she’d thrown a frazzled cotton dress, hair tangled, a sheen over her mottled flesh.

  Hubbard clears his throat, he pronounces her name, lifts his arms. Essie looks up, both hands dab at her eyes, she casts upward a skewered half-smile, unhooks her limbs from the stool, and plunges into his old man arms. He isn’t overly disturbed. She’s a strong woman suffering failing moments. Grey comes home and she shatters like broken glass.

  “Grey’s home!” she cried. “Yesterday I saw a family of cardinals and I knew they were an omen. My water tap ran rusty and that was another. Then I wake at four a.m. in a hysterical fit: he’d entered the town limits. I knew it. I want to borrow somebody’s pistol, put on my boots, and shoot him in both kneecaps.”

  “Not both. Both would be a dire handicap in his profession.”

  “Just one, then.”

  “There’s your son.”

  “I see him.”

  “What? The two of you are not on speaking terms today?”

  Has Grey Jr. been tracking his mother? Does he worry about her? An emaciated string bean boy of ten or eleven, in oversized sneakers and overalls bleached near white, standing half-hidden behind the dusty dwarf tree fronting the pool hall, for some moments had been in mute observation of them. A black rag tied around his head, concealing his brow. Hubbard snorts. He wants to know what name the boy is calling himself this week.

  “Tecumseh,” Essie tells him.

  “Which Tecumseh? The lauded Indian warrior or that sojourner through biblical nightmare, William Tecumseh Sherman?”

  “How would I know?”

  The boy has ventured forth. “Wipe your nose,” Essie tells him. He ignores her. He is tugging at Hubbard’s sleeve. “What will you give me for this here precious object unearthed from pure rubble?” he asked. He projected a wooden spool into which he’d thrust a popsicle stick, wads of grimy chewing gum anchoring tattered chicken feathers embedded at each end. “Son, try me later,” Hubbard said. “We got us a domestic situation to unravel.” The boy again poked the object at him.

  “How much you give me,” the boy asked, “for this one-of-a-kind foreign specimen, probably Navaho.”

  “Leave us alone,” Hubbard said. “Go make something else.”

  Essie had ceased weaving about. She had her breath back and was wiping her eyes on her dress. “What is it?” she asked. “What do you call that thing?”

  The boy was not quick to reply. He avoided looking at her.

  “Do you want your britches switched? Answer me.”

  “You the one liable to git her behind switched.”

  “Now you two hold on,” Hubbard said. He was put out with both of them, and with himself as well.

  “It’s a domestic bird of antiquated origin,” the boy finally said. “Only it don’t fly.”

  “Give him two cents for it,” Essie said to Hubbard. “Tell the little hotshot if he comes back with one that flies you’ll pay him a whole nickel.”

  The boy waited with a brightened face while Hubbard rooted about in a pocket. “I don’t like this one bit,” Hubbard complained. “Hellfire. I’m being taken to the cleaners and it’s not yet—”

  “Pay up,” the boy said. “I got business elsewhere.”

  A time later Hubbard was outside taking in the sun in his tilted chair; Essie sat beside him on a patch of weeds, her back leaning against the wall, long legs spread wide. “Keep them knees covered,” he told her. “I don’t want having no wicked thoughts this day.” Across the street, under the moving picture marquee, Grey Jr. was seen attempting to sell something to a man in a hat the colour of tobacco juice. The man kept shoving him back, the boy immediately returning. “That urchin go-gitter must somehow got contaminated by your Peterson blood,” Hubbard said to Essie. “Before he’s fourteen he’ll be building cotton mills in Mexico, same as your greedy forefathers would of done.”

  “I’d be obliged if you don’t mention that name,” Essie said. “Nor that other one I know is on the tip of your tongue.”

  “Well, you’re the great-granddaughter of one rogue industrial baron and so far as anybody knows still hitched to the other rascal.”

  “I’m not married as much as you think I am. Before nightfall the day me and Grey married, we were fit to be tied trying to get ourselves annulled, but the office scum in your dumb county refused to open the door.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Hubbard quickly said. “This whole town has heard about it ’til tar-and-feathering the lot of you is the recommended action. A dollop of female circumspection on these matters wouldn’t kill you.”

  “You know what you can do with your circumspection. I’m claiming ’til my last breath, the marriage wasn’t consummated. Everybody knows an unconsummated marriage ain’t a real marriage.”

  “Don’t talk like that, please! Hell’s bells, woman, you got a near-teenage son walking through town like he owns it, or would if it
was worth owning.”

  “I can claim Grey had nothing to do with that. The woods are full of fools who could be my son’s daddy. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

  “Shootfire, I’ll be danged if you. …Yours and Grey’s trouble ring in my head like clanging pots sun-up to sunset. Now sit there like a setting hen with a shut mouth and let an old man catch his rest.”

  “That paregoric bottle in your pocket is what’s addled your brain. Me and Grey have nothing to do with the sorry mess you make of yourself.”

  “That’s verbal assault. You take it back.”

  “I apologize.”

  “Accepted.”

  “I can’t help hoping Grey got a tiny bit singed in that goddamned wreck of a Ford. I won’t ask what was engaging the randy S.O.B. at State Line.”

  “You know very well they have pool tables at that Nitespot.”

  “Uh-huh. And Lulabelle and Trixie Foxtrot and Peach Blossom and … Say, what explains all that activity over at the movie palace?”

  “Are you ignorant? This town is on the map. We got ourselves a movie star.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman you’d like to hang.”

  Hubbard could have supplied Essie with the significant updates. He was tempted to, but wasn’t sure he dared. She was a poor windswept heifer curdled by love. He thought of her as—normally!—a sensible woman of considerable accomplishment, of respectable if unquiet disposition—a caring mother—normally! A fine cook, if ever one could guide her into a kitchen. Better educated than he, more humanely decent, more gracious, generous, responsible, dedicated, resourceful, and funny—normally! Of her housekeeping virtue, well, he’d reserve judgment on that, not being much of one himself. One thing for certain: she was—normally!—without being vain about it, just about the best-looking woman in the county. Her competition in this regard were the certain beauties at Bon Vivant Hair (and foot) Emporium, the ticket seller at the Imperial picture show palace across the street (he was this minute studying Carol Bly’s comely features as she set up shop for the matinee), and the Myrna Loy lookalike who worked the pumps in hip-hugging fatigues at the gas station out on the highway. Several he had courted in the long ago—and not to mention those many breathtaking Aphrodites involving haystacks and wet furrowed fields and barn lofts and pea patches upon whom only in stark, doomed imagination did I once lay. Or about a hundred others whose faces had become smudged over the years, and certainly not to usher into this privileged interrogation his own dear daughter across the seas or dear dead-departed Ruth, who could have pitched all of them into deep shade with the sheer wave of her elegant hand. But certainly to admit into this fabulous ensemble the woman he had unabashedly claimed that Essie might well, and possibly with good reason, want to hang: Viota Bee, bless her curves, the town’s reputed movie star.

  Debuting on the silver screen, by God, this very day, not thirty feet from where Hubbard sat sunning himself, as—mindless now—he scratched the head of the mongrel dog which daily, hourly, insisted upon. Thoughts of beautiful women wafted away. “What’s your name, dog?” he asked. The dog whimpered; it licked his hand. It vexed Hubbard that few dogs in this rank mill town had names and none wore collars. If you named a dog or put a collar on it you might then have to feed it. Someone at the Herald ought to editorialize on that.

  Amarantha hung by the Dinette door. “Your scalawag friends are having a nip in the back, if you want to join them. Otherwise, the pork rind marinated in sorghum molasses with mint and string beans is halfway edible, if your stomach is churning.”

  “It is now,” Hubbard said. “Godamighty, Sunshine, you know damn good and well this is the best dining parlour in the state.”

  “I guess you already had that nip,” she said.

  *

  It was Varner or Varmer—or even Vaneer as they sometimes called him—who first passed word that Grey was in town. Old man Varner had come across Grey passing the time of day with Cindy on Varner’s back porch. He’d had to smack little Cindy’s face to get it out of her that Grey only wanted, or seemed to want, only to know if her older sister, Viota Bee, was anywhere around. Had Viota skedaddled or was she hiding out from some boyfriend or was she that minute asleep upstairs in her four-poster satin-sheeted bed? “That was three questions too many,” Varner said, admitting he’d had to smack the nine-year old three times “pretty hard” to get replies satisfactory to him.

  Naturally Varner’s wife, Dottie, flew out at the first screech, meaning to rescue little Cindy, which got her face slapped in the bargain. It got the porch railing broke and a foot put through the newly-screened back door, the Varners and Grey scrambling one way and another, tugging, kicking, scratching, and punching at each other. Varner claims insults and dire threats were made to his person and to one and all, Grey telling them they were not one of sound mind in the whole family, save little Cindy and Viota Bee, the latter having been his confidante and troubadour since they sat beside each other in first grade. It was agreed by sightseers straggling rapt-eyed into the yard that Grey passed no such remarks, that Grey was a hallmark of gallantry and civility, only doing his best to fend off old Varner’s slaps, head-butts and throat holds and to torpedo Varner’s hollered intention to knock little Cindy’s perfumed head into next week. That madame Varner had scooted in outfitted in no more than a transparent nightie, bosom flaring, folks said, was what catapulted Varner into full-fire rage. It was clear, they said, that the nip or two the old juicehead had enjoyed in the peace and quiet of his rec room had helped promote him into a huffing toe-stomping bull, just as it was likewise clear Grey would have been wise to refrain from any approach, discreet or otherwise, to the Varner property, neither the front door nor especially the back door through which it was generally assumed he’d of dark night trespassed regularly. As evidence, who else but him until that fracas knew of the luxurious finery in which Viota Bee reposed, the four-poster bed, the haunting (red? black?) satin sheets she and who else but Grey were like to dwell within or on top of or beneath, whichever way they liked it, and proclivity or mood, impulse—demon blood—drove them.

  That whichever being none of our business, an innocent passerby might think, though that uninformed party would be dead-wrong and is hereby invited to keep his or her mouth shut, since the bitter truth, the raw facts, await the unfolding.

  Such is how Hubbard would have told it, and did tell it, once affairs taking place on Varner’s back porch got sorted out. He was a newspaperman for God sake, a tinkle or two past his prime, for goodness’ sake, but it was a newsman’s job, come hell or high water, to report, to deliver the news as objectively as humanly possible. He was not, however, a machine, and if some little sap of brotherhood was omitted in his report on those lousy Varner parents, or Varmer or even Vaneer as they sometimes said the name, then that was hunky-dory with him because he didn’t mind confessing he didn’t like the pair, never had liked them, only raving imbeciles did, because they were the two-bit kind that people had in mind when they resorted to the opprobrious, not to say slanderous, term fry in hell. Whereas, if you didn’t like Grey (and Essie and their little hotshot seedling, Junior) then you were outright stiff-necked windbags with no true claim to humanity.

  Ratty-rat-rap. What can be taken as solemn invocation here is that Grey ought to have known that Viota Bee had shed her hide of these parts. Essie knew it, Hubbard knew it, Bon Vivant staff and clients knew. Who didn’t? Goodness gracious me, hadn’t it been reported in the Weekly Herald? In the column signed by Anonymous: Soc(i.e.)ty (that is). On the Women’s Page, worse luck, alongside a recipe for Pork Belly Raisin Stew, flower arrangement hints, side-by-side columns by gossip queens Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, a Katzenjammer Kids cartoon. Miss Viota Bee Vadier, 29, long-term prized employee at Bon Vivant Hair (& Foot) Emporium and familiar figure about town, has tendered her resignation and is now seeking fame and fortune in Far Portsmouth to our wicked north. Go-Aw
ay festivities were held after-hours at the popular salon, which saw presentation to the former pulchritudinous Miss Homecoming Queen (1946), Miss Captivating Personality (1945,) Miss Buy War Bonds (1942), of a gold necklace (courtesy inspired proprietor Sallie Forth), and new pumps (courtesy Sam’s Shoes w/financial support from Bon Vivant staff (Joan, Judy, Bertha Bell)). J. Scrubbs performed on the mandolin. Legendary midget Alonzo Rapt delighted all with acrobatic feats. Ralph’s Barbecue of Weldon Road provided hush puppies and barbecue made, Ralph told Soc(i.e.)ty (that is), from midget pigs. “I’m happy the big priss is going” one sulky blonde was overheard saying. An overjoyed Miss Vadeen (Varner) was escorted to her new domain by Jim Beam Talley, former football star, now VP of Mercantile Dynamics, who predicted a gossamer sale of two bull cows at an agricultural fair en route. Happy sailing to the lustrous chickadee!

  Struck by the glittery, hyperbolic tone of the column, Hubbard had made inquiry to his old friends at the Herald consortium. Who is this Anonyous? he asked. We don’t know, he was told. It came in freelance. A madhouse of spelling errors, punctuation breeches.

  “Typed?”

  “More or less. You disliked it?”

  “Offered free?”

  “If we printed it we were asked to leave a dollar under a rock by the back door.”

  “Ah!”

  Essie and Grey Jr. were having an argument.

  “Those Varners or Vaneers or however they like calling themselves can, for once, shut their own traps,” is what Essie says. “Fools are born every minute and they are the living proof. Yours Truly is another one, if you are going to sit here and tell me all the time Grey was busy making you he was skulking through that Varner back door to wedge his way under or between or on top of red satin sheets that don’t exist in that house in the first place. Weren’t me and Viota good friends? Not in recent times, no, but haven’t I been a thousand times in that room? Where this four-poster idea comes from is the other side of the moon. If you ask me. Well, you didn’t ask me, and you better not, but I am telling you Viota Bee don’t tread on angel dust how you and Grey and this town claims.”