Sailor & Lula (2 page)

Society, such as it was, thought Lula, was certainly no worse off with Bob Ray Lemon eliminated from it. In her mind, Sailor had performed a service beneficial in the short as well as the long run to mankind and should have received some greater reward than two years in the Pee Dee River work camp for second-degree manslaughter. Something like an all-expenses-paid trip for Sailor with the companion of his choice—Lula, of course—to New Orleans or Hilton Head for a couple of weeks. A top hotel and a rental car, like a snazzy new Chrysler LeBaron convertible. That would have made sense. Instead, poor Sailor has to clear brush from the side of the road, dodge snakes and eat bad fried food for two years. Because Sailor was a shade more sudden than that creep Bob Ray Lemon he gets punished for it. The world is really wild at heart and weird on top, Lula thought. Anyway, Sailor was out now and he was still the best kisser she'd ever known, and what Mrs. Marietta Pace Fortune didn't find out about wasn't about to hurt her, was it?

“Speakin' of findin' out?” Lula said to Sailor. “Did I write to you about my findin' Grandaddy's letters in the attic bureau?”

Sailor sat up on his elbows. “Were we speakin'?” he said. “And no.”

Lula clucked her tongue twice. “I was thinkin' we'd been but I been wrong before. Sometimes I get like that now. I think somethin' and then later think I've said it out loud to someone?”

“I really did miss your mind while I was out at Pee Dee, honey,” said Sailor. “The rest of you, too, of course. But the way your head works is God's own private mystery. Now what about some letters?”

Lula sat up and fixed a pillow behind her back. Her long black hair, which she usually wore tied back and partly wrapped like a racehorse's tail, fanned out behind her on the powder blue pillowcase like a raven's wings. Her large grey eyes fascinated Sailor. When he was on the road gang he had thought about Lula's eyes, swum in them as if they were great cool, grey lakes with small violet islands in the middle. They kept him sane.

“I always wondered about my grandaddy. About why Mama never chose to speak about her daddy? All I ever knew was that he was livin' with his mama when he died.”

“My daddy was livin' with his mama when he died,” said Sailor. “Did you know that?”

Lula shook her head. “I surely did not,” she said. “What were the circumstances?”

“He was broke, as usual,” Sailor said. “My mama was already dead by then from the lung cancer.”

“What brand did she smoke?” asked Lula.

“Camels. Same as me.”

Lula half rolled her big grey eyes. “My mama smokes Marlboros now,” she said. “Used to be she smoked Kools? I stole 'em from her beginnin' in about sixth grade. When I got old enough to buy my own I bought those. Now I've just about settled on Mores, as you probably noticed? They're longer.”

“My daddy was lookin' for work and got run over by a gravel truck on the Dixie Guano Road off Seventy-four,” said Sailor. “Cops said he was drunk—daddy, not the truck driver—but I figure they just wanted to bury the case. I was fourteen at the time.”

“Gee, Sailor, I'm sorry, honey. I never would have guessed it.”

“It's okay. I hardly used to see him anyway. I didn't have much parental guiding. The public defender kept sayin' that at my parole hearin'.”

“Well, anyway,” said Lula, “turns out my mama's daddy embezzled some money from the bank he was clerkin' in? And got caught. He did
it to help out his brother who had TB and was a wreck and couldn't work. Grandaddy got four years in Statesville and his brother died. He wrote Grandmama a letter almost every day, tellin' her how much he loved her? But she divorced him while he was in the pen and never talked about him to anyone again. She just refused to suffer his name. But she kept all his letters! Can you believe it? I read every one of 'em, and I tell you that man loved that woman. It must have broke him apart when she refused to stand by him. Once a Pace woman makes up her mind there's no discussin' it.”

Sailor lit a Camel and handed it to Lula. She took it, inhaled hard, blew the smoke out and half rolled her eyes again.

“I'd stand by you, Sailor,” Lula said. “If you were an embezzler.”

“Hell, peanut,” Sailor said, “you stuck with me after I'd planted Bob Ray Lemon. A man can't ask for more than that.”

Lula pulled Sailor over to her and kissed him soft on the mouth. “You move me, Sailor, you really do,” she said. “You mark me the deepest.”

Sailor pulled down the sheet, exposing Lula's breasts. “You're perfect for me, too,” he said.

“You remind me of my daddy, you know?” said Lula. “Mama told me he liked skinny women whose breasts were just a bit too big for their bodies. He had a long nose, too, like yours. Did I ever tell you how he died?”

“No, sugar, you didn't that I recall.”

“He got lead-poisoned from cleanin' the old paint off our house without usin' a mask. Mama said his brain just fell apart in pieces. Started he couldn't remember things? Got real violent? Finally in the middle of one night he poured kerosene over himself and lit a match. Near burned down the house with me and Mama asleep upstairs. We got out just in time. It was a year before I met you.”

Sailor took the cigarette out of Lula's hand and put it into the ashtray by the bed. He put his hands on her small, nicely muscled shoulders and kneaded them.

“How'd you get such good shoulders?” Sailor asked.

“Swimmin', I guess,” said Lula. “Even as a child I loved to swim.”

Sailor pulled Lula to him and kissed her throat.

“You got such a pretty, long neck, like a swan,” he said.

“Grandmama Pace had a long, smooth white neck,” said Lula. “It was like on a statue it was so white? I like the sun too much to be white like that.”

Sailor and Lula made love, and afterward, while Sailor slept, Lula stood at the window and smoked one of Sailor's Camels while she stared at the tail of the Cape Fear River. It was a little spooky, she thought, to be at the absolute end of a body of water. Lula looked over at Sailor stretched out on his back on the bed. It was odd that a boy like Sailor didn't have any tattoos, she thought. His type usually had a bunch. Sailor snorted in his sleep and turned onto his side, showing Lula his long, narrow back and flat butt. She took one more puff and threw the cigarette out the window into the river.

“Five years ago?” Lula said. “When I was fifteen? Mama told me that when I started thinkin' about sex I should talk to her before I did anything about it.”

“But honey,” said Sailor, “I thought you told me your Uncle Pooch raped you when you were thirteen.”

Lula nodded. She was standing in the bathroom of their room at the Cape Fear Hotel fooling with her hair in front of the mirror. Sailor could see her through the doorway from where he lay on the bed.

“That's true,” Lula said. “Uncle Pooch wasn't really an uncle. Not a blood uncle, I mean. He was a business partner of my daddy's? And my mama never knew nothin' about me and him for damn sure. His real name was somethin' kind of European, like Pucinski. But everyone just called him Pooch. He came around the house sometimes when Daddy was away. I always figured he was sweet on Mama so when he cornered me one afternoon I was surprised more than a little.”

“How'd it happen, peanut?” Sailor asked. “He just pull out the old toad and let it croak?”

Lula brushed away her bangs and frowned. She took a cigarette from the pack on the sink and lit it, then let it dangle from her lips while she teased her hair.

“You're terrible crude sometimes, Sailor, you know?” Lula said.

“I can't hardly understand you when you talk with one of them Mores in your mouth,” said Sailor.

Lula took a long slow drag on her More and set it down on the edge of the sink.

“I said you can be too crude sometimes. I don't think I care for it.”

“Sorry, sugar,” Sailor said. “Go on and tell me how old Pooch done the deed.”

“Well, Mama was at the Busy Bee havin' her hair dyed? And I was alone in the house. Uncle Pooch come in the side door through the porch, you know? Where I was makin' a jelly and banana sandwich? I remember I had my hair in curlers 'cause I was goin' that night with
Vicky and Cherry Ann, the DeSoto sisters, to see Van Halen at the Charlotte Coliseum. Uncle Pooch must have known nobody but me was home 'cause he come right in and put both his hands on my butt and sorta shoved me up against the counter.”

“Didn't he say somethin'?” said Sailor.

Lula shook her head and started brushing the teases out of her hair. She picked up her cigarette, took a puff and threw it into the toilet. The hot end had burned a brown stain on the porcelain of the sink and Lula licked the tip of her right index finger and rubbed it but the stain wouldn't come off.

“Not really,” she said. “Least not so I recall now.”

Lula flushed the toilet and watched the More come apart as it swirled down the hole.

“What'd he do next?” asked Sailor.

“Stuck his hand down my blouse in front.”

“What'd you do?”

“Spilled the jelly on the floor. I remember thinkin' then that Mama'd be upset if she saw it. I bent down to wipe it up and that got Uncle Pooch's hand out of my shirt. He let me clean up the jelly and throw the dirty napkin I used in the trash before doin' anything else.”

“Were you scared?” Sailor asked.

“I don't know,” said Lula. “I mean, it was Uncle Pooch. I'd known him since I was seven? I kind of didn't believe it was really happenin'.”

“So how'd he finally nail you? Right there in the kitchen?”

“No, he picked me up. He was short but powerful. With hairy arms? He had a sort of Errol Flynn mustache, kind of a few narrow hairs on the rim of his upper lip. Anyway, he carried me into the maid's dayroom, which nobody used since Mama lost Abilene a couple years before when she run off to marry Sally Wilby's driver Harlan and went to live down in Tupelo? We did it there on Abilene's old bed.”

“ ‘We' did it?” said Sailor. “What do you mean? Didn't he force you?”

“Well, sure,” said Lula. “But he was super gentle, you know? I mean he raped me and all, but I guess there's all different kinds of rapes. I didn't exactly want him to do it but I suppose once it started it didn't seem all that terrible.”

“Did it feel good?”

Lula put down her hairbrush and looked in at Sailor. He was lying there naked and he had an erection.

“Does my tellin' you about this get you off?” she said. “Is that why you want to hear it?”

Sailor laughed. “I can't help it happenin', sweetheart. Did he do it more than once?”

“No, it was over pretty quick. I didn't feel much. I'd broke my own cherry by accident when I was twelve? When I came down hard on a water ski at Lake Lanier in Flowery Branch, Georgia. So there wasn't any blood or nothin'. Uncle Pooch just stood and pulled up his trousers and left me there. I stayed in Abilene's bed till I heard him drive off. That was the bad part, lyin' there listenin' to him leave.”

“What'd you do then?”

“Went back in the kitchen and finished makin' my sandwich, I guess. I probably took a pee in between or somethin'.”

“And you never told nobody about it?”

“Just you,” Lula said. “Uncle Pooch never acted strange or different after. And he never did anything else to me. I always got a nice present from him at Christmas, like a coat or jewelry? He died in a car crash three years later while he was holidayin' in Myrtle Beach. They still got way too much traffic there for my taste.”

Sailor stretched an arm toward Lula. “Come on over to me,” he said.

Lula went and sat on the edge of the bed. Sailor's erection had reduced itself by half and she took it in her left hand.

“You don't have to do nothin' for me, baby,” said Sailor. “I'm okay.”

Lula smoothed back her hair with her right hand.

“Damn it, Sailor,” she said, “it's not always you I'm thinkin' of.”

Lula sat still for a minute and then she began to cry. Sailor sat up and held her in his arms and rocked her and didn't say anything until she stopped.

“I knew this would happen. Soon as that piece of filth got out of Pee Dee I knew there'd be trouble. He's just got some kind of
in
fluence over her I can't decipher. There's somethin' wild in Lula I don't know
where
it come from. You gotta find 'em, Johnnie, and shoot that boy. Just kill him and dump the body in a swamp. Eliminate the problem once and
for
all.”

Johnnie Farragut grinned and shook his head.

“Now, Marietta, you know I can't kill Sailor.”

“Why in blazes not? He killed a man, didn't he? That Somethin' Somethin' Lemon person?”

“And he served his time for it. Another thing: If Lula is with him of her own volition—willingly, that is—there ain't much can be done about it.”

“Don't talk down to me, Johnnie Farragut. I know what
volition
means, and that's why I want Sailor Ripley off the planet! He's pure slime and it's leakin' all over my baby. You could push him into makin' some kinda move and then shoot him dead. You'd only be defendin' yourself and with his record nobody'd fuss.”

Johnnie poured himself another tumblerful of Walker Black Label. He held the bottle out toward Marietta but she shook her head no and put a hand over the top of her glass.