Tomato Red (14 page)

“Well, hello there, Jamalee.”

“Mr. Lake, how are you?”

“No complaints.” He was a tall narrow stoop-shouldered black-wavy-haired man. “Hey, Sammy.”

I nodded but she spoke. “Have you seen my brother?”

“No,” he said, and sort of laughed. “Can’t say I have.” He sort of laughed when he said most everything. I don’t know what causes that, but he was that way. Hotter’n hades, you might say, and he’d laugh. My wife split to Nashville with the ice-cream-truck driver; or, I drew the short straw at Happy Bark and won’t be employed anymore; My mom married a cop—he’d laugh at all those things and two million more. “I ain’t seen him for, oh, I don’t know. He almost always pokes his head in when he goes by.”

“I know he does,” she said.

“He’s a nice young fella.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s gone, is he? Since how long?”

“One night.”

A long bolt of laughter unrolled from him.

“Why, Jamalee,” he said, “I expect that boy has been holed up somewhere learning the
secrets of the night
. He’s an awful handsome—”

“Nope,” she said, and we left.

I waved to him, to show courtesy, as the door slapped behind us.

She sat over there in the Ford, her face expressing several things not good. The possible answers had got loose in her head and the bad ones chewed her deep.

I flip-flopped my own emotions and smiled.

“He probably just didn’t run,” I said. “Lake’s likely on the money. He’s up . . .”

“
No, no, no!
”

Aw, this foolishness had no bottom to it, and we had begun to realize that.

 

WHOEVER SET IT up set it up to look like nature done it. Jason’s nature and the big nature both—his to get him in that pond foolishly, the big one to make waste of a fool.

I didn’t study him much, him there on the mud bloating and colored different from his settling blood. There were cans of drunk pop-top cocktails tossed about near where he laid. Whiskey sours and Cuba libres and margaritas.

The law didn’t seem to be interested in the cans, or the fishhooks, or the body either.

“I’d say he dove in here, probably been drinkin’ and got all sweaty, and swam out to where he was snagged on these
ol’ hooks and lines,” one of them said. “There’s a rough bottom to this pond, prob’ly a thousand hooks broke off out there.”

“Pretty new hooks,” I said.

“I guess some could be.”

William the John Law had been in the crowd there, and he stepped forward and sort of took over. He said, “I sure am sorry, Bev. This is a sad, sad thing. I guess the boy didn’t swim so great, did he?”

“He wasn’t much for swimmin’, no.”

“I see that.”

“I mean,” she said, “Jason didn’t swim
at all
.”

The officials looked away from her, shined their lights toward the pond, scanned the beams over the dark water.

“Ah, well,” William said, “then I guess it’s no wonder he drowned, is it?”

ONLY ONE PLANK of ham was left but I dropped it into the black skillet and fried it up. It was one of those sort of particle-board hams made by taking different pieces of ham and mashing them together. To me it tasted fine and went great with this potato dish some girl from his high school class mixed up and dropped by. Romella herself brought the ham, and I’d been eatin’ from it since four days back. The whole holler seemed to slump more. The food had been laid out over in Bev’s place. I was the only one you could say tried to eat much, stay strong. Everything had got to feeling gray. There’d been a couple of pies, rhubarb and peach, and a plastic vat of a salad mixture in a thin dressing. None of them wanted to come inside but they did want to show their faces and leave those sympathy dishes for the family.
The Scroll
told of his passing a short drop down the page from another article on the future of the battered golf course. The funeral attracted a small circle and featured no sermon and went by in a blink. Things flurried in my head. A couple of jack-leg ministers fell by but gave up pretty quick. The girls from the salon donated plenty of other foods to snack on. Tim Lake of an evening sent a bucket of crispy chicken. Trains roared past and it seemed yelled spiteful I-told-you-so’s sent from across the nation. The days felt sad and slow, and him dying was treated like a thing that deserved a reward because we’d been eating fat and richly since that boy choked under for the third time in that scummy green pond.

Mother and daughter took to grieving in their separate houses which I wandered back and forth between. Some fellas who’d done Bev left a bottle of scotch and several kinds of wine with handsome labels. Neither of the gals hardly ate much at all. They huddled and hunkered differently. The scotch suited me. Death and liquor seem to always call for each other. Call and response. I had let myself leak for the first time since that other time. Throw your emotions loose. The dog moaned and scratched and begged for petting. My head showed four movies at once and around the clock. Tears dropped like walnuts.

At the one house, I happened on Jamalee all curled in a baby ball, her droopy blinky eyes ringed with tired from loss and pills, and she looked at me and said, “I’m trying to escape. Escape to anywhere, but I’m not. I’m not going anywhere. There isn’t any anywhere, is there? Another hoax on me.”

And later she again spoke from the baby ball. “Hey, Sammy, I’m floating. There’s a smart breeze flying me—show your ticket, grab hold.”

At the other house, Bev would smile out of some reflex. Her face didn’t mean what her brief smile said. She didn’t drink much, really, except for wine. Cigarettes calmed her, or some such, and her shack filled with smoke and she sat there staring through the smoke straight at a wall. She avoided windows, kept her eyes fixed on that wall. She sat that way for hour after hour, then another, sipping wine and lighting cigarettes but not saying a word.

Then, when I’d about forgot she sat there, suddenly she says a single line: “There’s all kinds of mean business on two legs out there.”

The weather didn’t help. The weather kept picking at us—nothing but heavy wet heat, sweat, heat, sweat, bugs,
bugs, and bad whipped moods. The weather stayed in that attitude of weather where you can’t help but wonder just who it is you’ve pissed off so.

But I had been wondering that anyway.

Light was sliding into dark and Bev talked again: “Oh, did I just say anything?”

“Naw.”

“I didn’t just now blurt something?”

“I didn’t hear it.”

“Whew! Thank God.”

I went away then and ate that last fried plank of ham and thought and thought and paced. The scotch got to asking questions.

I think one of our cardinal fuckups is how we insist that even vicious whimsical crazy shit needs to make sense, add up, belong to a reason. We lay this pain on ourselves—there must be a reason behind this horror, there must, but I ain’t adequate to findin’ it, and that’s my fault, so torture me some more.

Way past nightfall I flicked the TV on and sat in the squeaky rocker. Some show played, kids who drive Porsches to high school and eat in sit-down restaurants on their own, but there’s this emptiness in them, apparently, bigger than the beach. They were folks you’d like to meet sometime and leave in a car trunk at the airport. The show, though, was candy to the eyes. I rocked and watched.

Bev kept on just sitting there staring at that empty wall like it was a mirror.

When Jamalee came over she smacked the door shut and Bev and me turned to see her. She’d been mighty roughed up by her feelings for a few days and looked it. Her hair had gotten slack from being dirty and those tiny hands quaked a bit and her face had been screwed down tight. She put everything
important into one stinky sentence and flung it in the middle of us: “
He’d never go swimming!
”

IT COULD’VE BEEN a happy dreamy spot on a hot summer night. A place for a few cool beers and maybe a bout of taboo courtship with somebody who sniffed and claimed not to know you in daylight. It could’ve been the secret spot you snuck away to with your secret eighth-grade girlfriend from the big brick house on the hill and skinny-dipped and made her pregnant in the moonlight and ruined everything for yourself in that town even worse and not exactly brightened her days much either, except it was the spot where Jason died and you couldn’t quite feature the other stuff happening there anymore.

The lights from the Pinto busted the dark over the pond and let us see the green water and green scum glow.

“That water looks icky,” Bev said.

“It’s just water that don’t move,” I said. “Scum’ll flat skim over still water.”

“Your point is?”

“In heat like this you might swim in it anyhow.”

“Not with all those hooks.”

“I don’t believe in those hooks. There ain’t any pond anywhere with hooks and lines in it
that
thick.”

Jamalee said, “Prove it to us, huh? Prove your point, Sammy.”

She stood there tiny and looked even more tiny in the shirt she wore. The shirt was white and long-sleeved, one of Jason’s, and it draped on her loose with the tails hanging
down her body to where a short skirt would finish. The sleeves were rolled back to her elbows and she wore peach-colored track shorts and blue rubber sandals, the kind for in the shower. Her voice had taken on a crackly croaky quality from being so forlorn and leeched of pep, I guess.

“I wouldn’t be scared to,” I said.

“Of course you wouldn’t.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“No, no, huh-uh. So dive in.”

“The water probably feels good.”

“The
water
probably does.”

“I don’t believe in those hooks.”

“Prove it, baby, with a real big splash.”

I walked to the edge of the green water. I looked out over the pond and it wasn’t too much. It wasn’t too much to swim across or anything. I picked my way along the bank and at each step the nearest and next frog would leap to the pond. There were scads of them there. You couldn’t see them, but as I walked they plopped the water in a rippling rhythm like piano keys being swiped from one end to the other and swiped at whatever pace I walked at. The moon wasn’t lit up very bright. A grab bag of dank smells were smeared around and about that pond.

“Sammy?” Bev did a sort of shouting whisper. “Sammy, hon, where are you?”

Her voice brought me back to the light. The headlight shafts were hectic from bugs flying dizzy close to the car but they thinned out as the light pushed away over the pond. Jamalee stood there on the downslope, slipping her sandals over long grass blades, looking down; then she spun in a mindless tight circle and sighed.

I undressed fast, over to one side of the headlight beams, pulled everything off until I became dressed only in boxer-type
skivvies which I kept wearing. There were little sharpnesses underfoot straightaway. Gravel, I guess, and shards from shattered bottles that had gotten shattered by folks who’d been on this spot being dreamy years ago and busted their bottles and left the shards as a signature instead of initials on a tree trunk inside a heart.

Bev saw me disrobed and said, “You don’t have to. You don’t have to get in that icky pond, hon, if you’d rather not.”

“I’ve been in worse.”

“You swim strong, I hope.”

“Strong enough for floods.”

The scum parted some where I hit that water, parted like a bullet hole, then began to heal back around me. The temperature felt close to body heat, but I don’t guess it was. But it felt like it was and that temperature acted as a relaxant, better than a pill, and my muscles began to ease lengthwise and come unknotted. My feet touched bottom; the scum rose to my nipples.

Things had fallen into that pond since it began, I would imagine, back when. Things had fallen in or washed in or got tossed in and sank to the mud bottom and acquired that slippery coating of green stuff that looked like cheap felt when you saw it but made your feet slide from things with a quick jolt plenty of times. You could find a place to stand, but walking in that pond was hard. A big assortment of logs especially were underfoot. The logs made a jumble there, rip-rap such as bass really like to live in. You couldn’t walk across that, your feet were always sliding and plunging between logs in the jumble, barking your shins and bruising your ankles.

I tried to keep the light over my shoulder.

There were pairs of eyes all over ahead of me, shining and staying still. You always have to remind yourself that those
eyes attach to mere bullfrogs and hope you ain’t conning yourself. Those eyes just sit there until you hear the croak and then they’re gone and the pond scum swishes a bit.

Bev said, “So? How’s the water, Tarzan?”

“Like takin’ a bath.”

“Uh-huh. Only you don’t get clean.”

“Right.”

“You think I should swim in there?”

“Sure. It’s not that bad. It’s water. It’s water in summer.”

Jam said, “I can’t swim, and I don’t care to.”

“But we do,” Bev said. “I’ll have to trust your opinion, Sammy. Trust that water’ll be okay for delicate ol’ me.”

I could only sort of see her on the bank, behind the light beams, but I could tell she was shedding attire.

“I wouldn’t steer you wrong.”

“If you say so, hon.” Her voice went singsongy and way Southern as she said, “I always have trusted in the kindness of alcoholic rednecks.”

She stepped slowly down the slope to the pond. She put a toe in the water and made a silly shiver like an actress might, pretending the water was cold. Her T-shirt was on yet, a pale blue one, and she had those purple panties on that display just a skinny strap up the crack and look so wonderful. She didn’t ease into the pond, but reared back and flew herself out flat in the air and hit the scum like a swan, gliding away from shore with as much grace as the pond would allow. Her hair caught the headlight beams and held them there and shined, it seemed, like a planet.