Wolf Whistle (3 page)

Dr. Dust was more like fifty-something, and he wasn't really waiting, he had a wife, and no ranch. He wasn't even answering his telephone.

And did it really matter that Santa Claus had restored a mute woman's voice, and her hope in this world?

Alice had to get out of Balance Due while it was still safe to move along the roads with these children. They walked quickly, one step at a time, without looking from side to side. Violent men were awake now, cursing whores in the rain-drenched street.

T
HE DAY
Glenn Gregg's daddy got back from New Orleans was the same day Lady Sally Anne Montberclair decided to park her big white Cadillac out in front of Red's Good-lookin Bar and Gro. and leave the motor running and scoot inside, out of the first drops of rain, on an errand. Glenn's daddy was named Solon.

Solon was a skinny man, with thin, greasy hair. He had been sleeping in his clothes for six months to protect himself from creatures in his mattress, gabardine pants that were baggy in the butt and a western-style shirt and a bolo tie, brogans on his feet. Solon considered himself a ladies' man.

It was early September, still hot as blue blazes in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. Now this rain! The Delta was steaming. The colored school hadn't even started up yet—the white school started the week before—and so there were kids standing around up on the big front porch of Red's store, colored children, teasing and messing, all time messing, their parents would say, flirting with each other and playing grab-ass, when Lady Montberclair showed up.

Bobo, he was the center of attention, always was, fourteen years old, fote-teen he pronounced it, always into
something, always had him a joke going, a dare, something another, some kind of mess, all time messing. Wore him a white shirt, too, like a natural man, Bobo did, not no feed-sack shirt neither, uh-uh, Bobo had him a tie knotted up at the collar, tied it his ownself, four-in-hand, something another, and a wide-brimmed felt hat pushed back on his head, and a big-ass gold ring look like a walnut on his finger, “Italian gold,” Bobo said, out on the porch of the store, “Eye-talian” he pronounced it. Bobo was a spote, sho now, what you say.

Bobo, he's saying, “Who want to look at my lizard,” that's what he's saying, be making little girls out on the porch squeal, sho was, and little boys be saying, “All time talking about lizard, uh, uh, uh,” and all he's doing is be showing off a picture of his Chicago girlfriend, which he carried in his wallet, a white girl, lizard-skin wallet, bought it down to Mr. Shanker's Drug Store, right in Arrow Catcher, but how do they find a lizard big enough to put your money and your pitchers in, is what Bobo wished he knowed. Actually it wont no picture of his girlfriend, it was a picture of a movie star, Hedy Somebody-another, Bobo don't care, Bobo he'd say most anything, make somebody squeal.

He had a couple of the kids fooled about the movie star, too, the one he said was his girlfriend. Bobo said, “That's some good white stuff.” The little girls squealed
and covered their faces, and the boys burned with envy, even those who didn't believe him for one minute, they said, “All time talking about tail.”

A couple of guitar players were there, too, black men, out on the porch this morning, sitting in cane-bottom chairs with their big boxes, blues singers, singing Robert Johnson tunes, just to wake themselves up a little bit. Robert Johnson was the King of the Blues, that's what people said. Robert Johnson grew up right down the road from Arrow Catcher, down in Morgan City, got hisself killed, long time ago, by a jealous husband. Don't that seem like just the way the King of the Blues ought to check out of this life? Blues singers like those on the porch revered Robert Johnson, they liked to start their day playing Robert Johnson tunes.

One of the singers sang about waking up in the morning and seeing the blues walking like a man. He sang, “Come on, blues, take my hand.” This was Blue John Jackson singing, he was a big man. The other man, he didn't sing, the albino. He had pale, pale skin and white nappy hair and split lips. He didn't hardly talk. He wore him some dark shades, day and night, because his eyes was pink. He was just called The Rider. Sometimes he put down his box and blowed on his harpoon, he had about four harps, all different keys.

Everybody was scared of The Rider. Wouldn't nobody
talk to him. Everybody said The Rider had pink eyes like a grave rat. Everybody said The Rider had done been brung back from the dead by a hoodoo woman name of Lily.

Bobo looked at The Rider. Bobo said, “Uh-huh.” Bobo had this little smirk. He pushed his hat more back on his head. The Rider was playing “The Preaching Blues” on his guitar. Bobo walked right up to him. Bobo said, “Hey, Rider, you's a mysterious motherfucker, ain't you.” The little girls squealed. The little boys said, “You crazy, man, you crazy, you all time talking about mysterious.”

Anyway, here come Lady Montberclair, just when Solon Gregg come blowing back into town from New Orleans wearing gabardine pants and plenty of Wildroot Cream Oil. All Lady Montberclair was wearing this early in the morning was a canvas trench coat and a pair of bedroom slippers. Leastways, that's the way it looked to Solon Gregg, who was interested in this sort of thing, like the ladies' man that he was. Lady Montberclair was bare-legged and rumored to be modern.

Well, when did you wake up, girl, goddamn! Look at you, coming straggling out of bed, ain't done scratching yourself and looking like the unmade bed you just straggled up out of! Law-zee, Lady Montberclair! White lady's hair looked like it hadn't never been combed, long and blond and falling down across her shoulders like some kind of
movie star. She wont wearing no makeup, eyes looking like a raccoon, make you want to kiss her right on the durn mouth.

Solon ran a steel comb through his hair, which had just grown in after the house fire six months ago. Solon hadn't set foot in Arrow Catcher since the fire, hadn't seen his wife or children since then, neither. Armed robbery was Solon's trade, though he was not adverse to other honest work either, you know, extortion, for example.

Well, Sally Anne Montberclair she was a good-looking woman, there wont no doubt on this green earth about that, now was they, she did have a nice turn of ankle, sho did. That's what Solon Gregg was thinking just at the same time he was taking a little taste with the boys for old time sake.

Runt Conroy, he was standing in Red's place, too, like usual. Runt looked like a weasel, with real beady eyes, and wore a felt hat with a grease stain on the crown. He looked especially bad lately, since his wife had done left him, Fortunata, and run off to Kosiesko. Runt's niece Alice had come to look after the children, so that was good, didn't interfere too heavy with his drinking. Runt had Fortunata's phone number in Kosiesko, down on the coast, funny-looking durn number, too, if you asked Runt, just in case of an emergency, but he was scared to call her up,
she might hang up on him, and besides that he didn't know who might answer the phone, and, anyway, what bigger emergency could there be than your wife running off and leaving you, and Fortunata already knew about that, didn't need to be told.

Runt wore the hat pulled down over his eyes like Humphrey Bogart. Runt figured he might be a happier man if he had him a good strong name like Humphrey instead of Runt. Cyrus was Runt's real name, but nobody never called him that, never had. He was the smallest of the children in his family, when he was a boy, and his daddy always called him “the runt of the litter.” It stuck, wouldn't you just know it.

Runt slipped his half pint of Early Times into his jacket pocket, out of sight. He turned away from the vision of Lady Montberclair in her man's trench coat, in gratitude for many things, and focused his attention on other things, things that didn't scare him quite so much as them raccoon eyes and blond hair, the Royal Crown box, the half-empty shelves in Red's store, a bin full of black bananas and half-rotted peaches, a scrawny chicken in the meat case. That chicken looked like the victim of a lynching.

Another patron of Red's, the housepainter Gilbert Mecklin, was on hand, with his blind daddy, Pap. Gilbert always wore white painter overalls and a paper cap with Curry
Lumber Yard printed on it, and he smelled like paint and turpentine and Aqua Velva shaving lotion, in addition to the whiskey.

Gilbert opened up the meat cooler and took a big knife off the butcher block and sawed off a hunk of rancid cheddar from the wheel. Then he took his old blind daddy, who always wore aviator sunglasses with green-tinted lenses, out in back of the store to look at a hellhound Red had lassoed down at the town dump when it was half-grown and brought home for a pet.

Pap said, “Can you pet it?” Talking about the hellhound. He held onto Gilbert's arm like a child.

Gilbert said, “Feed him that hunk of cheese first, see don't he warm up to you a little.”

Out on the porch the colored children were messing. They were giggling. They were talking trash. They were saying, “I dare you, I dee-double-dog dare you.”

The blues singers were singing a song about the devil knocking on their door. Blue John Jackson sang about greeting old Satan like a natural man. He sang, “Come on, Satan, take my hand.”

Solon Gregg still had his eye on Lady Montberclair, him being a ladies' man. He raked his steel comb through his hair, and felt the teeth of the comb on the raised scars left in his scalp by the fire. His head was still tender.

Solon was about to say something to Lady Montberclair,
he was about to call her by her given name, Sally Anne, see could he make her squirm, when two things happened that shut him up, good and proper.

The first thing was, Lady Montberclair spoke first, before he could open his mouth. She was talking to Red about a purchase. Red owned Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro. He stood behind the counter. Red was old and freckle-faced and his hair, which stood straight up on end, was mostly white now.

Lady Montberclair said, “Red, I know I'm intruding here, and I'm sorry, honest I am, but it's an emergency. Do you carry tampons?”

The truth was out about Sally Anne Montberclair: she was modern.

The rain that had threatened to fall all morning began to fall in earnest now, plink-plink-plink, on the porch roof and on the tin hellhound shed out back.

Rufus McKay, a sixty-year-old colored shoeshine boy, woke up in the shoeshine chair from a dream of electrocution and sang the chorus of “Danny Boy,” and slept again.
The pipes, the pipes are calling.

Pigeons fluttered in the rafters, nervous.

The blues singer, out on the front porch, sang about walking with the devil side by side. He sang about beating his woman till he gets satisfied.

The fact is, Red did carry tampons, and sanitary napkins,
too. He kept them beneath the counter, wrapped up real careful in butcher paper, like plain white Christmas presents. He just never had sold a package of feminine items to a woman before. He kept a bone-handled .44 pistol right beside them, so he would always know right where it was.

Usually men bought Kotex. A man knew how to purchase a box of Kotex. A man would whisper a discreet word to Red—like, “The Crimson Fairy's visiting my house today, podner, can you do a little something to help me out?”—and Red would slip him what he needed, like contraband, to be smuggled away.

This was the first time a woman had ever asked Red for such of a thing.

At first Red didn't say nothing. He only put both his hands down on the countertop and stared far away into the distance. His jaw jerked with a small convulsive twitch; he might have been having a seizure of some kind. Red was not believed to be a well man. Some people said he ought to go on and retire and maybe take himself a Florida vacation.

Then, without ever looking directly at Lady Montberclair, Red reached up under the counter, beside the big pistol, which he nudged to one side of the shelf, and pulled out a small, wrapped package and placed it on the open space in front of him, between the jerky and the jug of pickled eggs.

The lithesome Lady Montberclair fished her wallet from
the pocket of the trench coat she was wearing, and started to take out a half-dollar piece to pay for her purchase.

The blues singer on the porch sang that he had to keep moving to stay out of the path of the blues, he sang that the blues were falling all around him like hail.

The children on the porch were daring and double-dog and dee-double-dog daring Bobo. They said, “Axe her, you so smart. Axe her, you like white stuff so much.”

The blues singer sang that there was a hellhound on his trail, a hellhound on his trail.

Red said, “No charge.”

Lady Montberclair looked at Red. She said, “No charge for Tampax?”

Red didn't want to be making change over no box of tampons. He already like to been had a stroke.

He said, “It's all taken care of.”

Red wished he hadn't said this. He didn't want to seem to say that the tampons were on the house. That didn't seem right. Or that one of these old boys standing around here was buying it for Lady Montberclair, like it was a drink. “Compliments of the gentleman at the end of the bar.” That wasn't right, neither.

Lady Montberclair said, “But that's silly, Red. Here.” She placed the half-dollar on the counter.

Red didn't know what to do. Making change was out of the question.

He said, “Thank you.”

She said, “Is that enough?”

He said, “This is what it costs.”

She said, “Exactly? Is there any tax?”

He whispered, “Lady Montberclair,
please.”

She said, “Oh, all right. Thank you, Red. Much obliged.”

Blue John Jackson sang,
Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.

So that was the first thing that kept Solon Gregg quiet for a few minutes, what Lady Montberclair said. It looked like nothing else was going to happen. Even Solon Gregg was finding it hard to speak to a woman who had just paid hard cash for tampons and on her face wore the look of a woman who meant to use them, as advertised.