Wolf Whistle (7 page)

Mainly, though, he'd take Juanita in his arms and hold
her so tight to his chest that neither him nor her would never be lonely again, and she wouldn't never have to remember her daddy's hands on her body. He'd say, “Neaty, baby sister, howdja-doo, howdja-doo, howdja-doo!”

But what kind of names were Snooky and Giselle, anyway? Well, Snooky wasn't bad. He knew an old boy name of Snooky Butler, had a place out in Cohoma County. Snooky let Solon go pig hunting in the big woods one time, long time ago. Snooky was all right. He let Solon use his .32-20 to hunt with. But Giselle? No way, man. He didn't want nobody name of Giselle baking him a cake, not if he could help it. If I'd of knowed you was coming I'd of changed my name, is what Solon wished Giselle McKenzie would sing to him.

Solon didn't expect no cake when he got home today, that much he was certain of. Solon figured he'd be lucky if anybody was civil to him. His wife hated him, his children were scared of him, some of them. The last time he saw his own house, he was jumping out through the window with his clothes and hair on fire, headed for the bus station. His oldest boy, Glenn, had tried to set him on fire with gasoline.

Solon had heard from several different sources now that Glenn, his murderous child who was so handy with a jug of gas, had gotten his ownself singed in the same fire he started. Well, Solon didn't want no innocent child to be
hurt in a fire, of course, but at the same time, didn't it really just sort of chap your ass to no end when somebody tried to murder you, even your own son?

I mean, didn't it really just serve the little bastard right, in a way, getting scorched in his own fire? Ought not nobody pour gas on a drunk man and strike a match and then fail to get some signal that it was an inappropriate thing to be doing to your daddy, is all Solon meant, that's all he had to say. So he wanted to keep his homecoming expectations low. That was the main thing. He was trying to be realistic.

B
ALANCE
D
UE
, the white-trash ghetto, ran right into the Belgian Congo. It looked about the same as when he left, except that it was fall now, late summer. There were no trees here, only house after house, shack after shack, all the same, on both sides of one long straight Delta road.

Power lines swagged from post to post, high above the muddy street, a fragrance of creosote, released from the posts by the rain, always heavy on the warm breeze.

Solon Gregg walked on, in the direction of his house.

On top of each light post, high above the street, perched a buzzard, many buzzards, one right after another, post by post, down the road, as far as you could see, to the railroad tracks, an enormous flock that slept at night in a cypress swamp not far away and came out to sit on posts with heavy-lidded eyes by day. The big birds were slick and black
with rainwater where they sat with hunched shoulders and wattled necks like sad old men in dark coats.

The locals called them swamp eagles, sometimes just eagles, though they were clearly buzzards. The birds were descendants and remnants of an ancient flock, attracted here long ago by the corpse-stench of a Civil War battle, when Balance Due and the Belgian Congo were only a big field, a significant Mississippi defeat. Cannon shells and belt buckles and maybe a finger joint still turned up, from time to time, in the muddy street after a hard rain.

These birds were a part of the glorious history of the South. They were written up, now and then, in local newspapers, and in newspapers all across the state of Mississippi. Photographs taken almost a hundred years ago by anonymous photographers with big, boxy explosive cameras and tripods and black drapery over the photographer's head, and recent photographs as well, some in color, stood behind glass in display cases in the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson.

Historians studied the century-old photographs and even named the birds in the flock. Schoolchildren from all around, every county of this sovereign state, as it was always referred to in political speeches, visited the museum in Jackson, and even visited this dangerous street in Arrow Catcher, on field trips, to view the historical vultures, to learn something of their solitary nature, their weight and
length, their wing span, their reproduction cycle, their incredible longevity.

Some of the birds on the light posts beneath which Solon Gregg trod on his way home were as ancient as the historical battle itself, older, ninety, a hundred years old, a few of them, so historians and ornithologists reported, and so, as part of this same flock, those birds on the light posts above Solon Gregg had actually fed on the flesh and eyes and tongues and nutritious organ meat of Confederate troops, fallen, hungry, frightened boys before they were made buzzard bait by a mini-ball or cannon shot.

Historical experts identified, with some certainty, several of the very birds in those early photographs. They pointed to dim details of broken-and-rehealed wings, or unusual posture, or mutations of feathering. They looked through binoculars, or they even drugged and carried individual birds away to scientific laboratories in Jackson and Biloxi and spread them out on stainless-steel tables and poked at them and said, “See the similarities between this bird and Bird Vardaman in Photograph Seventeen-A, upper right quadrant, grid-number Thirty-six? It's him all right.”

The buzzards were named Vardaman and Bilbo and Hugh White and J. P. Coleman and Ross Barnett and other names of past and future governors and senators of the sovereign state of Mississippi.

Other birds on the light posts, youthful by comparison,
possessed only blood-memories of the ancient feast, genetic egg-yolk longings for distant, unremembered culinary ecstasy and freedom from deprivation, and sat with hope in their bird hearts and nothing at all in their bird brains, for many years, decades really, a human lifetime and longer, above the homes of damaged rednecks and maniacs with pistols, on smelly light posts planted in stinking mud, whiling away all of their valuable, irretrievable daylight hours and years in the sad innocence of poultry-patience during this lean century since the glorious Festival of Dead Rebels long ago, and they were content for now with roadkill.

The vulture named Ross Barnett, ancient and ugly, had excellent eyesight. Far away in the distance, at the lucky spot on the rails where the Katy crossed the Dog, Ross Barnett espied an armadillo, not moving.

Ross Barnett closed in prayer his heavy-lidded buzzard eyes and sucked swamp air inside his lungs to savor the fragrance of loss.

Where had they come from, the tribe of armadillo, this gift, this manna, this perfection of the South, sweeter than turtles?

Ross Barnett didn't like to be greedy, he was as good-natured and open-minded and as willing to share the riches of Mississippi as the next old buzzard, but with an armadillo, well, no, he didn't think so, he thought maybe it
would be best for all concerned, best for the flock, really, not to do that, not just now, and it wasn't entirely selfish, either, it was just a better idea for him to head on over towards the cypress swamp as if he were calling it a day, and then, when the others were settled in, sucking in swamp poisons with their sleepy, vulturely snores, he would circle back around to the crosstracks of the Katy and the Dog and discover just what sweet surprise this little armor-backed Delta dumpling had hidden away from him, deep inside the shell.

S
OLON
G
REGG
arrived at his home. The window was still busted out, where he had, six months ago, jumped through, in flames. Shards of glass still lay on the ground.

The little house where he had lived out the tragedy of his adulthood was the same, and yet he hardly recognized it. It seemed larger, brighter.

He didn't bother to knock, he walked right in.

Wanda, his fifteen-year-old daughter, was the first person he saw when he entered the house.

She was holding a straw broom in her hand, which she dropped onto the floor with a clatter, the instant she saw him. She was terrified of him. She gathered her long shirt-tails up in both her hands and wrung them like a wet rag.

Solon had forgotten how beautiful she was, how grown up. She was wearing bright blue pedal pushers and one of
his old shirts with the long tail not tucked in. Her hair was longer, he noticed, and she had it drawn back in a pony tail and secured with a wide rubber band. She looked like a real teenager, the ones you heard about on the radio and saw pictures of in the newspaper and watched on the TV sets owned by queers in New Orleans.

He saw the fullness of his daughter's breasts and was filled with gratitude that he had never touched her, as his father had touched his sister Juanita.

The younger children ran into the room and hugged him, and said, “Daddy, Daddy!” He knelt down to greet them.

Mrs. Gregg came into the room then, from the bedroom. She did not speak, of course.

Wanda, the teenaged daughter, was still paralyzed with fright, where she stood. The broom still lay on the floor where it had fallen.

Solon did not know how to ask forgiveness.

He said, “Where's Glenn?”

The question was so innocent that choirs of angels in heaven must have begun to sing when he asked it. He knew nothing of his son's terrible injuries.

Solon's wife and daughter, and even his two infant sons now looked at him as if he might be a man from Mars.

Where's Glenn?
they seemed to say.
Did you actually say that? Where's Glenn? Are you serious?

Solon said, “I ain't mad. I deserved it.”

He ran his hand once through his hair, to make a small joke about his burns, the fire-fed and sudden baldness he had experienced as he flew through a closed window.

He tried to make his voice sound light and friendly, despite the attempted murder and the violence that led up to it.

Every word out of Solon's mouth produced on the faces of his wife and children a profounder expression of disbelief.

He said, “I reckon I do got me a little bone to pick with him.”

Mrs. Gregg said, “Y-y-you don't know, you really don't know, do you?”

Solon stood up in the middle of the floor, with a little smile on his face, like a dim bulb. As he stood, he picked up the two children in diapers and held them, one on each hip.

He said, “Know what?”

He looked first at his wife and then at each of the children in his arms. He tried to keep his dim-bulb smile from fading away altogether.

Mrs. Gregg said, “Oh, Solon, what has become of us?”

Slowly, he squatted and set the two children in diapers down on the floor. He could not hold them any longer, he was afraid he might faint and drop them.

When the children were on the floor, they did not move away, but only held to their daddy's legs without speaking.

Solon said, “He's not, I mean, is he …?”

Mrs. Gregg said, “No, he's alive.”

For the first time, she came near to Solon, and took his hand.

Glenn was in the next room, she said.

Solon was like a man waking up after long sleep. He recognized now the clean, fresh aroma of paint in his nostrils. The rooms had been painted, since the fire. In his mind's eye he saw geese running across a yard and beneath clean linen on a clothesline, he saw himself as a boy, whistling in the pale moonlight past the graveyard.

Mrs. Gregg led her husband in the direction of the dying child.

The whole family went into Glenn's room and stood beside his sickbed. He was propped up against two pillows, lying on a clean mattress with crisp white sheets in an iron bedframe.

Oh, Lord. Solon had no idea. Oh, my Lord.

For a long time they only stood there, looking at the dying child. Solon was grateful his wife did not kill him on sight. He looked at the child's scars, the lidless eyes.

From a corner of the room, Solon took up the tattered, cheap-ass, cardboard case that held his Sears and Roebuck guitar, the instrument that had first belonged to his rapist father, and then to himself.

Solon held the guitar across his knees, secured around his neck by a heavy, old, sweat-stained leather strap, which
Solon's father had used to beat Solon when he was a child. He sat in a straight-back chair.

Solon's clumsy left hand went up and down the frets of the guitar neck, seeking the few simple chords of the Blue John Jackson song that Glenn had once loved. His right hand, which for six months had become more accustomed to holding a pistol than a guitar, strummed and picked at the wire strings across the hole of the guitar.

In her lap, propped at a forty-five degree angle, Mrs. Gregg held a zinc washboard. She had brought it in from the kitchen. It was the same scrubboard, with dried soap scum in the runners, that she used with a bar of hard soap to scrub her family's clothes clean of dirt and color in a Number 2 washtub.

On each of the fingers of her right hand, like five strange and dangerous wedding bands, were affixed the washboard picks, with which she transformed the appliance of her kitchen and back porch and aching back into a musical instrument. When she drew a pick sideways along the runners in a certain way, it emitted hornlike song and tone.

Wanda, the beautiful daughter wearing her daddy's shirt, held her strange instrument between her spread-out legs, where she sat, flat-footed, in her chair. It was a wash-tub from off the back porch, no different from the one that her mother leaned over on washdays, in the kitchen in the winter, on the back porch in the summer, round, zinc, with
handles on either side, except that between Wanda's feet it was turned upside down and some additions had been made to it.

A wooden broomstick had been sawed off to half its original length. A strand of piano wire was affixed by a steel staple to the top of the shortened broomstick, and the other end of the wire ran through a hole in the center of the washtub and fastened to a ten-penny nail on the other side. This was a one-string bass.

Wanda propped the free end of the broomstick against the raised rim on the bottom of the washtub. She could tauten or loosen the length of piano wire by raising or lowering the broom handle, and when she plucked the wire with her fingers, she made a deep and rich and metallic music of
thoom thoom thoom thoom,
to accompany her father's guitar.