Tomato Red (7 page)

Over at the sink I saw Jason wrap a towel around the wet head of this pretty good-lookin’ gal, totally adult but fine, and they exchanged quick glances as if things had happened between them during that shampoo that they should try to keep secret.

I realized I was weak to her.

AT NIGHT, ABANDONED house cats roamed the holler, their voices sounding like a pack of babies prowling the tall weeds and trash heaps, wailing for love. They hit notes in their cries that communicated stuff you don’t want to understand. They seemed all over out there, and their sounds terrorized Biscuit. He’d hear them and fall to his belly, then shimmy that way across the kitchen floor to the screen door and raise his head just high enough to sneak a peek.

Bev swung by barefoot with a meat lover’s pizza one night, and diet pop, and her and Jason and me and Jamalee crowded the kitchen, our presence giving Biscuit enough guts to moan a bit. I sat on a straight-back chair with a dish towel clothespinned around my neck as a barber shawl. Jason had the equipment and needed practice, see, so he dove in on my hair and had at it. He said I’d cut a figure when he was done clipping and buzzing.

“Cut a figure,” Bev said. “Right.”

I said, “That seems a lot of hair sifting down.”

“Be unique,” Jason said. “Be aloof and singular.”

“Okay. Just, I don’t want to be a joke.”

“Am I laughing?”

“He’s sure not laughing,” Bev said. A chair was there for her, crowded in beside the fridge. She dressed to cast her daughter in a frumpy light. Her blond hair had been brushed down and choked into a bun. Her jeans were faded and enticing,
snug enough I believe I could see the imprint of her moneymaker. And a black T-shirt.

There was one-butt-wide worth of empty counter space beside the sink, and Jam had hopped up and sat there. The kitchen walls had become the color of baloney rind left in the sun.

She held a road atlas split across her lap.

“This map starts to get really interesting about a state and a half from here.”

“Which way?” I asked.

“Every which way, I’d say.”

As seemed to be her habit around home, Jamalee wore an ankle-length and loose smock that covered her shape like a hiding spot she took with her everywhere. The colors, even, were flat: grayish, greenish, whitish. A few times she’d stood with the sun on the revealing side of her and I could see she had a tight tiny figure under there and tended toward little bitty dark panties.

“Why do you think everything away from here is so hot?” I asked.

Bev broke in, like a momma. “It’s this way, Sammy. When
I
was a young filly the Beatles showed up in our lives, and all the girls screamed and got soakin’ over which ones? Paul and John, of course. But, not
me
.” She shook her head and swallowed some pizza. “Huh-uh. I set
my
sights on Ringo, don’t you see? If a girl met him, a girl might truly have a chance, him with that nose and all, a chance she’d
never ever
have with Paul or John. My fantasies, don’t you see, had
possibility
in them. Now,
Jamalee
, though, she’s the sort that has got to have either of the superstar dreamboat Beatles or
both
, or she’ll pitch a hissy fit that’ll last to her grave.”

I said, “Boil
me
down and I’m just a Beatles song. All I need is love, love, love.”

“Oh, now, aren’t you a sweetie.”

“Let me tell you,” Jam said, a bit hot, “a story about why.”

He had the buzz cutter going along the top of my head, but I turned enough to see her.

“Uh-oh,” Jason said, “which one?”

“The school one.”

“I think that’s maybe your best, hon.” Bev dropped a pizza crust back into the box, picked at some stuck cheese. “You’ve told it the most, anyhow”

“Thank
you
, Beverly. Anyway, Sammy, some years back, when I went to school, I had gotten to be palsy-walsy with this girl, Tabitha Bain, whose family owns the Bain Furniture Factory over there, past—”

The talking got suspended while a train hooted and bullied by, everyone stalling where they were as if a timeout in life had been whistled, until the tracks carried that racket away.

“. . . the feed mill.”

“Yeah. It’s near Happy Bark.”

“That’s it. Now, the Bains are rich, plenty rich, got the great rich big house up on Penney Drive, starin’ down on the town, and Tabitha was just about smart enough to manage a C average if she worked hard. But she was lazy. I mean, she’d been born rich, why bust her hump? But her mother wanted her to go to a hot-shit college someday and land a beau who was at the
national
level of rich, take that next step, you know. So she hired me to do Tabitha’s papers for her. Now, every paper I wrote that was handed in with Tabitha’s name on them got an A, and my own papers with my own name on them never got higher than a B. Mostly C’s. To the teacher, don’t you know, a Bain was
supposed
to
sail on, but a Merridew should just get pregnant or go to jail or jump off a cliff. The school here had designed
us
for the scrap heap. The heap that hangs out in crummy bars and does minimum-wage spot work.” She flipped a page of the atlas. “Our entire futures in West Table had been agreed on and settled the very day we were born.” She flipped a few more pages. “That’s why
everywhere
else looks good.”

Her point was one I’d already felt, but I shared some of the blame in my version. I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had
volunteered
for the pits.

I said, “I hear you, Jam.”

Bev pulled a joint rolled in chocolate paper from her cigarette pack and held it beneath her nose. “Everything you told us there could’ve been turned to your advantage, but no, you’d rather stew and sulk and dream trippy dreams.”

“You’re not smoking that in here. You know my rules.”

“Oh, that’s right. No drugs in this house except for those pills you pop, hon.”

“I
need
them. They give me tempo.”

Jason said, “I don’t like arguments. Please stop here.”

Bev got up and walked over and pushed out the screen door. “I’m goin’ home to have a joint and a highball and turn the TV on to something funny.”

She let the door slam.

That boy slaved over my skull. He clipped and studied and buzzed and studied and drug the comb through there.

“You’re startin’ to really look tough. Are you tough?”

“Me? Tough? Naw, naw, naw. I’m a great big ol’ crybaby. You’ll see me gettin’ rushed to the hospital every time there’s a loud noise or a bumblebee threatens me.”

She didn’t look up from the atlas.

“He’s lyin’,” she said. “His daddy was a pit bull and his momma was a train wreck.”

Then this instrument, a clarinet I thought, started to be played out there in the night. I could hear it clear but that music had traveled to reach me. It seemed to be from atop the ridge above the holler. The song was a kind of ragtime tune, sort of jaunty and limber. The cats took it for the call of a great leader, or something, and bawled their respect.

The kids stared at each other for a tense, long glance; then Jason dropped his implements and basically
lunged
from the kitchen.

I heard the door to his room slam.

I guess my expression asked the question, because she said, “That’s Mr. Hart, the music teacher, practicing his dick-sucking on a clarinet. He pulls to the side of that road up there and tosses those musical numbers down here, alluring my brother on.”

We both sat there with Biscuit, listening to Mr. Hart unroll his serenade.

“He’s got Jason on his mind constantly, I do believe. He’s tried to convince Jason that he’s Mr. Hart’s breed of man.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s right, too, but I need Jason to sleep with women.”

“How’s that?”

“There’re all these women calling and everything, offering for Jason to practice on them on Mondays, when Romella’s is closed. I need him to woo those ladies so we can get, like,
dues
from them and raise our getaway dough.” She retrieved the atlas and opened it to a map of the entire country. She put her finger in the Ozarks where we were. “Palm Beach, Florida. That’s the place for us.” Her finger moved slow from here toward there. “We get the money, pack up, get a car, and just sort of mosey slow across these other states, just
bleed
toward the beach down there.”

I said, “I got a car.”

She laughed me into my place and left me there.

For about three or four more songs me and Biscuit sat on the stoop, feeling small together, taking in the music. He was pretty damned good. In fact, that Mr. Hart could
play
!

 

I KICKED THE bedroom door open and shouted, “What in the hell did you do to my hair?”

Jason laid on his bunk, belly down. His eyes were red and there were sniffles.

“Oh, don’t be mad. It’s a style called ‘flattop with fenders. ’ ”

“Mad? I
love
it, man! You do truly have a
talent
, kid.”

“Don’t try to cheer me up.”

“I’m not. I
love
what you did here, on my head.”

“Don’t tell me that if it’s not true.”

This style of hair said things, made claims. On top it was a flattop, but the sides were long and slicked back to create puffy fenders. It was a hairstyle that’d signify cool cat
rock-ability
, darlin’, if I plucked the upright bass at Hernando’s Hideaway in 1956. It was the revealing presentation of that special inner me I’d been looking for, and that boy had found it and gifted it to me.

“Listen, Jason, I’m sincere.” I slid my hand across the flat part. “You gave me a trademark. I didn’t have one of my own before.”

A small wall lamp burned beside his rack. He gave me a couple of looks, looking to see if I was messing with him, then swung around and sat up on the edge of his bunk.

“You’ll need some Butch Wax.” Jason stood, then, and cocked an eyebrow and sucked on his lips and closely examined my head like he just might bid on it. “Now, that
is
good,” he said. “The élan and balance, you know, it’s all there.”

“Whatever. I like it and thank you, kid, and that’s all the thankin’ I’m gonna do.”

“You’re certainly welcome, Sammy, sir.”

The light in there was small and vague. Shadows angled and rounded from the corners and the ceiling, and that one puny pat of light sat surrounded by them.

I could see Jason put a hand up to his head, the hand made into a seashell he cupped to an ear. He leaned toward the window where gray moths and brown bugs beat a rhythm against the screen, paused, leaned farther.

“The clarinet,” he said. “I don’t hear it.”

“I think your music friend split.”

“
Friend?
” Jason, you know, turned and faced my way, but he was wrapped up in an angled shadow so his expression was kept from me. “That’s not the word. That word won’t exactly do. I wonder, though, could I talk to you, Sammy? I
need
to talk to
somebody
, and I feel like, you and me, we
are
friends.”

He used that word, the word I’d used wrong, but it’s the right word to use on me.

I climbed up to my rack and plumped my pillow and stretched out like a mud puddle in a wheel rut.

“What about?”

What I’ll say about what Jason said: There had been tumult in his young emotions and recent experiences, and Mr. Hart set off revelations in him and his pecker, and I think Jason knew how he and his pecker truly felt about Mr. Hart, but he needed to be soothed some, patted on the back, told it was okay to go on and be who he was and do those things with Mr. Hart to his true taste again and again, which is a picture I don’t care to paint.

Jason finally said, “I felt like he’d wangled and wangled to get me on that field trip. I’d been pretty swept away. You
could say I didn’t fight as hard as I could’ve. I can’t say it was awful. Ever since then Mr. Hart has been
woo-woo
all over me.”

“Think of what you want, kid, what you want to happen or not happen, then make it clear.”

“Well, I mean, Sammy, could
you
do it the other way? The sex stuff? The sex stuff with men?”

“They say you can learn to if you draw life.”

“What’s that answer mean?”

“I ain’t drawn life.”

Jason, you can see by now, was a really good kid, basically. I had respect for him and concerns, too. A country queer like that is going to have his interior qualities tested a whole lot. You’ve got to have a suitcase of respect for such as come through that, and come through it daily—nightly, too, I imagine, and likely the lunch hour as well. It ain’t the easiest walk to take amongst your throng of fellow humankind.

“But now, Sammy, my next question to you is, What do you do for heartache?”

That question sprang me from the top bunk to the floor. I wanted to put a finish to this chat.

“Take a switch to it,” I said. I let my feet loose. “That’s the limit of what I know.”

 

JAMALEE HUMMED IN the kitchen, bent inside the fridge, and the fridge light threw a shadow inside her nightie tent that gave me a notion, so I grabbed her ass. That palaver with Jason had got me all stoked for pussy, don’t ask me why. Her rump was a firm small melon which my two hands cradled perfect.

She whacked my hands away with hers. She almost turned to look at me, then didn’t bother.

“No, no, huh-uh. That’s
not
in the cards, Sammy.”

“I’m all stoked, Jam. Awful stoked.”

“It’s not my fault you got yourself a stiffie.”

“I really want you, darlin’. Bad.”

“Uh-huh, let me guess: You probably already love me, right?”

“That must be it. This feeling.”