Trash Sex Magic, page 18
Rae’s young man wasn’t making very good use of his time with her mother, in Gelia’s opinion. Was he a man or a mouse? Gelia bet that he would have snook back to his job if she hadn’t been there and stood up for him, the big fat chicken.
Hafta show some ginger if he wants to play with my Rae.
She bantered him, giving him a hard time, answering none of his questions, so’s he’d know a Somershoe woman is hard to please.
Under her banter, Gelia felt sad. She hadn’t had to pander for Raedawn since the child was fourteen and Cracker had started to get on her nerves. She thought wistfully of the interns in the clinic in Rimville, the ever-changing faces at the high schools, and her old steadies at the power plant, the courthouse, the Berne firehouse. All those men seemed far away now. Counting the roster of her personal favorites and Ernest Brown, the man who kept her sane, it seemed to her like they was all used-up old shoes. Old. She felt old, and it made her sad.
With disfavor she watched the man of Rae’s choice fumble the repartee. He kept looking anxiously at his boss, kept trying to be serious with her. As if he didn’t notice she was a woman.
I could make him want me, she thought with a flicker of glee. But she had promised Ernest she wouldn’t. Rae wouldn’t be pleased neither. She was already sick of pleasing Rae, and it hadn’t even begun yet. So tempting to take this one, just once.
Well, it wouldn’t mean much if she won. They’d had that out years ago—which of them could take a man away from the other.
No, it wasn’t worth it. The consequences would be a dilly.
That was all she needed at her time of life, Gelia admitted frankly to herself for the first time, to put her brand on this feller right before he got filled up with all that electricity. Besides, he wasn’t her type. If she could have another one like the old one—
But that wouldn’t happen, she thought with regret. Never in a million years. There’d never be anybody else like him. That was the meat of it.
She wanted the old one back, not some young football-player-size stud with no experience and a attitude like, well, what was wrong with this feller anyway? Didn’t he just want to reach out and grab her? What’s men coming to these days?
This line of thought headed straight for feeling old again, and she veered off it. He’s just not the same, she thought. Guess I’m a one-man woman at heart.
She flirted with him, tweaking the heat, dodging his questions, until the shouting boss came back to lay down the law.
While Bob Bagoff talked in a tense, insincere undervoice to his workman, Walter reopened negotiations with Mrs. Somershoe. She made him nervous.
“Why, I surely would like to talk to you some more, Mr. Chepi.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “Why don’t you come over and we’ll have a little set-down? We’ll be all alone.”
“Um, tomorrow, perhaps?” It was pure funk, but Walter felt a powerful need for air. “I’d like to dress a little better before calling on your home. And find a florist.” Happy thought!
She slapped him playfully on the arm. “Well, ain’t you the perfect gentleman?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Mink led Ink to the golf course at the northernmost end of their territory. The late afternoon was too cold for all but the hardiest golfers to be out. The children came to a tall grassy hill all over holes, a rabbit warren, and they sat utterly still for perhaps an hour, waiting for the baby rabbits to come out and lip-lop around the golf course lawn.
Several times she heard Ink’s tummy growling. She ought to get them some food. For some reason she didn’t want to. He’d just have to control himself and watch rabbits.
She felt funny inside. She felt as if her skin had become very porous and the millions of tiny pores were expanding, making her bigger inside than outside, so that smells and sounds and sights could fly around inside her. She had chosen to watch the baby rabbits because they would run away if she moved, and she needed to be utterly still. Maybe the feeling would go away.
It didn’t go away. She felt hollow inside. The rabbits hopped around, scratched, sniffed, chewed grass, but mostly they sat. She thought maybe she knew what that was like. The longer she sat still in one place, the more she felt herself opening up, and the world rushed in at a million tiny holes all over her body, making her feel like she could see out of the back of her head or look out of her heels down deep into the ground she squatted on. The smells got so strong, they talked to her whole body, not just her nose. There was too much to see, and it was moving way too fast. She could feel the rabbits getting ready to hop before they did it. Even with her eyes shut she knew which one would hop first. The rabbits knew, too. They could tell when you moved even if they weren’t looking at you. Maybe they’re all open holes like this, too, she thought.
Probably she was just hungry. Willy probably had a loaf of bread back at the trailer. She stayed where she was.
The rabbits had a zillion different-colored hairs on them, even on their faces. Brown, black, tan, gray, red, gold, white. Their whiskers flipped forward and back, sometimes both sides at once, sometimes one at a time. She imagined having whiskers. Probably it would help you see behind yourself. In her mind’s eye her whiskers were stiff and strong where they stuck into her upper lip. She twitched her upper lip around, moving imaginary whiskers, and finally sat motionless, letting the fine tips of her invisible whiskers tell her what was going on around her.
The air got colder as the sun slanted lower. Cool air seeped in through her million pores, and her skin shrank and swelled with every heartbeat.
The rabbits chewed grass. The grass smelled rich, full of sunshine. She could imagine pulling it up and eating it herself. I’m hungry, too. But if she moved, the rabbits would run away. So she held still. Her stomach wanted to rumble. She breathed carefully so that it wouldn’t. Smells came in through a million holes all over her body. New grass, saliva, musky momma rabbit. Baby rabbits smelling like baby everything, new and fresh and good. Rabbit poo: hot and musky momma rabbit poo, sweet baby rabbit poo. And that was just the rabbits themselves. Beyond them she smelled her brother, so much like herself that she didn’t really smell him at all. Then the sycamore overhead, and the worm-cast dirt below, and the river down the hill, a single speedboat way out there, putting out diesel fumes and growling.
Sounds, too. Sounds entered not just at her ears but all over her body. Sparrows rustled among fallen leaves, squirrels chased each other and, far away at the other end of the golf course, there came a whack of somebody hitting a ball with a club, then the thock of the ball hitting a tree, and an anguished cry: “Fuuuuck!” That throbbing up there was a plane, going to the local airport. She let the sound carry her upward, rushing up and out through her own pores into the air, higher and higher, until she knew how the sky must feel where it pressed down on the pointed tops of trees, all tickly with new leaf.
She knew a moment of panic. What am I? She wanted to move, scratch, rub her nose, smack her lips, fart, anything to find her body again. She swooped back into her skin and stopped herself just in time from moving. Baby rabbits nearby, don’t scare them. Maybe, she reasoned, maybe this is why animals are always hopping around eating and pooping and scratching and sniffing and licking theirselves. Tweeting and pecking and biting under their feathers with their beaks. If they stopped still and just listened, just listened and felt and smelled and looked, they’d be in trouble. They’d fly out of their bodies and be everything and never move. And then a fox would get ’em.
Ink’s smell changed. She ought to have expected his touch. But when he touched her arm, she leaped convulsively, rounded on him, and socked him good in the eye. He cried out and clapped his hand over his face. The rabbits scattered.
She snarled, “What!”
Ink whimpered, his hand over his eye. “I’m hungry.”
Now that she had moved, she found she couldn’t sit still for another minute. “So go eat!” she yelled.
Leaping up, she darted off into the woods between fairways. When she looked back, Ink was staring at her. It was her job to find food, she remembered, fuddled. She didn’t care. She was hurt or scared or startled or something terrible.
Mink turned and ran again. She heard her brother follow her. He called out to her once, but she ignored him and kept running. She felt the beginning of the grandmother of all itches coming in through the soles of her feet. She ran on.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Her daughter was waiting for her when she crossed the road. It was nearly dark. Rae stepped out of the box elder trees in front of their trailer and came to meet her. Gelia could see the fire in Rae’s eye from twenty paces away.
“Let’s you and me have a little talk, Mother.” Rae took her by the arm.
“Don’t grab me so hard,” Gelia complained. Her voice sounded weak and whiny, but she felt a great reserve of power left over from that unsatisfying talk with Rae’s young man. Ready when you are, Daughter, she thought, and clicked her teeth. “Where you been?”
“Watching you. We had an agreement, Mother,” Rae said in a steely voice.
“I remember.”
“Do you?” Rae let go her arm with a little shove.
Gelia was comforted to recall that she knew where to find every one of her daughter’s sensitive spots. Looks like we’re gonna need ’em tonight. “Well, goodness gracious, don’t let’s have a scene,” she lied, high glee in her heart.
“Shall we go under the hill?”
“I’m agreeable.”
Gelia headed across the road with a fresh spring in her step. Nothing clears the air like a good knock-down-drag-out. A little tussle and she’d feel like a new woman.
Walter watched the two women stalk across the road, make a half-circle around the site, and head straight at the ridge where he was standing. He sidled behind a bush with his thermos, trying to be invisible. He could practically hear the air crackling as the Somershoes, mother and daughter, strode past.
They walked straight past him without noticing him, slap up to the ridge where it rose like a wall out of the meadow.
And then they simply disappeared, mother and then daughter, the elder as if fleeing the younger. They disappeared into the black hillside, spinning sideways through solid ground. His mouth fell open.
Then he heard their muffled, angry voices.
“You said you weren’t interested in Alexander. Was that a lie? Are you? ’Cause I’m about fed up. I’ll lay off if you want him, but you got to be honest with me.”
“You know I don’t want him.”
“Then what the hell were you up to out there today?” Rae sounded furious.
Walter stepped closer to the ridge. No door, no gate. Just a wall of dirt and trees. He leaned and laid his ear against the hard-packed soil.
“Getting your boyfriend out of the trouble he’s in. Tried to find if there was some gumption in him, too, but there ain’t. He’s a-scared to come calling on you, child. That boss of his got him working twenty-four hours a day. I had to go shake the law at them like a newspaper at a dog.”
Rae’s voice wobbled. “Shaking your bottom at him, more like. I say again, do you want him? Do you know, King Gowdy has asked me to marry him? I am that close to giving up, Mother. All of it. And all of you.”
“I don’t want your man, Daughter. Surely we don’t have to have all that out again?”
“I don’t want to have it out. I know you and your fights. You purely love it. Well, I don’t! I’d rather give Alexander up than go through that again, and you know it. I’d rather leave town with King.”
Gelia’s voice turned to a whine. “Why don’t you believe your mother? I said I don’t want him.”
“You lie.”
“Not this time.”
“Yes this time. And every time. You swore to me.”
“I was just looking at him. At a time like this I got a right to know who you’re taking up with.”
“What do you mean, at a time like this? Well? Cat got your tongue for once in your life?”
“Since they cut that tree down, since you just got to know.”
Tree? thought Walter. That one got past him.
“What difference does it make what man I’m with any more? It’s over. He’s gone. Nothing’ll bring him back.”
Mrs. Somershoe sounded oily. “The more reason. You better keep that Bahama feller. You’re gonna need a man now.”
“What do I need a man for? To get married? You want me to leave, don’t you. You never wanted me around, and now you think you can just chase me out of here.”
“Not at all—”
“Yeah, I heard you. I like this guy. It’s not because they cut—cut down—it’s just because I like him, so you want him!” Rae yelled.
“Child, there’s more people involved in this asides just yourself and your fancy. This thing’s big. We all got to exercise some self-control.”
“Fine one to talk about self-control! Who can’t keep her knees together for twenty-four hours at a time? Who forgets to feed the kids?” Her voice rose higher and harsher. “Who sleeps half the day and prowls half the night like a bitch in heat? Who ends up feeding them and cleaning this place and working every crummy job in these two towns while you’re shaking your thing?” The mud against Walter’s ear trembled with the force of Rae’s scream.
“I don’t want this one.”
“I am so sick of hearing that lie!”
“Why can’t you believe in your mother for once?”
“’Cause you’re a liar, Mother!” The hill trembled again. “How can I trust a liar?”
“Quiet, child, you’ll bring the hill down on us.”
“You just spread yourself around like a cloud, and if it’s a happy cloud I guess we’re all lucky, and if you got a bad mood we all suffer! You don’t even know what’s you and what’s the world! ‘Be quiet, child.’ Well, I won’t!”
The soil crawled under Walter’s hand. Water oozed out of the dirt and ran over his fingers. The whole ridge shook, and the hairs rose on the back of his neck. A rush of droplets spattered on his head.
“And now you got me screaming again, damn you!”
Gelia sounded syrupy and understanding. “I know you hate me, darlin’. Oh, not all the time, I know. Children have their bad tempers. It passes. When you’ve seen what I’ve seen, you won’t question your mother so much.”
“Shut up!” Rae shrieked. “Just shut up!”
“Tsk. You used to have better control of your temper.”
“What’s the matter with you? Why won’t you let up? I’ve offered you the guy. You said you don’t want him. Not that I believe you.”
“You’ll be wiser someday.”
There was a pause. Walter considered running for his El Camino. Maybe if he locked the doors and hid under the dashboard.
Rae’s voice came more quietly, “Come on, Gelia. What do you want from me? I got nothing else, you know that.”
“It’s no use talking to you once you’ve lost your temper. I remember when you was fifteen. Lordy, the way you’d scream.”
“I stopped screaming and started just giving you the man.”
“Oh, yes, you had contempt for your old mother, you just let go of the rope with that snooty look on your nose—”
“That used to be enough for you. What’s changed, Gelia?”
“Don’t use that patient tone of voice with me.”
“Is it because they cut him—cut him down? No use taking it out on me. It won’t bring him back, Gelia. Not fighting, not crying, not nothing.”
“Catch you crying over him!” Gelia laughed scornfully. “You done nothing but make hay since Wednesday!”
“Look, I’ve had it. I don’t know what you want or why you’re goin’ after me like this. If you’re grieving, fine, but don’t take it out of my hide. And I changed my mind. I take it back about Alexander. I’m keeping him. I’ll fight you for him. Let him decide which of us he wants.”
There was another long silence.
“This ain’t the same old fight, Daughter. It’s different.”
“Oh, baloney. That’s lame, too.”
“Don’t you feel the change in the ground?”
“I have. What about it?”
“Listen! Can’t you hear the whole river groanin’?”
Gypsy stuff again. Walter felt a powerful need for shelter. He tiptoed away clutching his thermos to his chest like a shield, slid behind the wheel of his El Camino, locked both doors, and poured hot cocoa with shaking hands.
Rae caught her breath and listened for the river. The living night hummed. Her mother had that lying look again, but this time Rae felt the truth nearby in spite of Gelia, coming to her out of her own skin. She would have to get alone if she was going to figure it out. There’d be no thinking with Gelia attituding at her like a dose of poison gas.
She murmured, “It shifts every day.” She felt the hum in the ground, in the fingers of trees around them. She thought about how the river shifted west at night, closer to their houses. “West at night.”
“That’s right. West by night, east by day. He was holdin’ it, you understand? Holdin’ it westerly. Now he’s gone, the rubber band’s gone an’ snapped, and it wants to go back. We’re gonna see a flood like there’s never been, child. If we’re lucky we’ll gain land when it settles. My proppity line goes way to hell out in the water.”
Rae listened with one ear, trying to puzzle through whatever Gelia must be leaving out. Of course he’d held the river close. He was always thirsty. Now he was gone, and the river had shifted east—by day. By night it rose to the west bank. That bespoke indecision. Why? What was drawing it back and forth?
With the other ear she attended to the night. Out there, beyond their temporary hole in the hill, beyond the site, beyond the railroad tracks and 31 and their tumbledown trailers, the river groaned against its banks.
