Phantom Nights (7 page)

"Or closed up? What he's been through in his young life does bring a lot of anger to a child."

"He's probably going to a special school soon—another month or two. We're talking about it."

"You and Alex?"

"No, he doesn't know yet. Once we've got it all settled." The need for a cigarette was making him restless, Mally's cue that she'd overstayed.

"Well, good night, Mr. Gambier."

"Good night, Mally."

M
ally got home feeling too edgy to sleep. The diamond ring missing from Alex Gambier's finger was right where she expected to find it, on the shelf above the wash stand in the bathroom. Grimy tape made it small enough to fit the boy's ring finger, although it was the kind of old-style ring men of substance flaunted on their pinkies. She left it where it was.

Habit more than anything prompted Mally to unpin her other nurse's smock from the clothesline on the front porch and iron it in the kitchen, as if she still had employment and would be going to the homestead at seven-thirty in the morning to relieve Priest Howard's night nurse. She hung the smock up in her bedroom chifforobe and returned to the kitchen of her four-room house. Cinder block and roof-shingle siding, well made, wouldn't leak through Noah's flood. She pumped water for the kettle. Mally was a coffee drinker in the morning and a tea drinker at night. Spearmint or chamomile. With her tea strainer steeping in the cup she opened a jar of home-canned peaches, removed the paraffin plug, and carried everything to the screened porch, where she settled down in her bentwood rocker to enjoy the peaches straight from the jar. Traffic on Route 19 was light, whoosh of a car or small truck going by every thirty seconds or so. She heard jump music from the Negro tonk a quarter-mile down the road, what the sheriff's deputies called a "dinge joint." When the wind was right she could smell the gage they all smoked there. The tonk was one that attracted mostly the ill-natured and shiftless, and there was frequent knife play.

She heard a tom or maybe a bobcat yowl in the deep woods behind her house.

A big car went past the turnoff next to the boarded-up rib shack, traveling slower than most traffic on the straight road. Seconds later, Mally saw it again, backing up this time.
Buick or Pontiac
, she thought.
A V-eight most likely
. The car stopped; Mally studied it. Couldn't tell who might be inside, how many.

Evening Shade wasn't a bone-dry county, but liquor was legally for sale in only a single package store run by a sister-in-law of Sheriff Luther Tebbetts. So bootleggers abounded in the hollows and the hills. There were those white men who preferred the potent kick of 'shine to store-bought popskull. Even prosperous, churchgoing whites who drove nice cars and ought to have had better sense. It was strictly a case of know your bootlegger if you wanted to drink the stuff and go on living.

The black V-eight sedan moved again, turning onto the gravel beneath a live oak with the canopy spread of a revival tent. It came slowly toward her house, crunch of gravel beneath the whitewall tires. Lights on high beam. The driver stopped short of the timber bridge that crossed a drying-up streambed thirty yards from her porch. Mally lit up motionless in her rocking chair with her jar of peaches, face turned aside to avoid the glare.

Highpockets' old Fox 1912-model shotgun was just inside the door and loaded. Mally didn't want to kill anybody, but a load of birdshot aimed at the knees would be more than enough to rout any stranger who set foot unbidden on her porch steps.

No, mister, no 'shine for sale here; you've come to the wrong place
.

Mally and whoever was in that big car waited. Then, after half a minute or so, they backed up slowly until the headlights swerved off of her. When she took another look, she recognized from the prominent hood ornament that it was a Pontiac, that Big Chief Indian profile. Moments later the car was gone and the night got quiet again except for owls, cicadas, and a lone bullfrog in a puddle lamenting his aloneness. A mosquito whined in Mally's ear.

A little later she went inside and locked the front door for a change, picked up the shotgun and carried it back to her bedroom. Shade rolled up on the window, but just outside there was a pretty willow tree hung like watered silk and filtering the light of the moon. Mally opened her steamer trunk with the brass fittings she kept polished and took a ribbon-tied packet of letters from a drawer. Then she lay down in her slip on top of the patchwork quilt on her narrow bed, holding the letters that she knew by heart in one hand. In near darkness, the only light came from the dial of her Crosley table radio, R & B, Fats Domino on WDIA from Beale Street down there in Memphis town, then Louis Armstrong with that voice like gargled chocolate, the music fading in and out, surf sounds, Mally dreaming deep inside William's letters from the Pacific, wearing the flimsy paper like a nighttime skin. The changes in William's tone as his ship steamed urgently into great battles. Guns pounding away at midnight, garden of unearthly blooms. In a calm dawn the sea a junkyard paved with oil. Fishing out floating men in life vests with heads brittle as coal. Eyeless, only gleaming teeth unburnt. Three of Mally's last letters to William had come back to her weeks before he appeared on their doorstep like two men side by side. Divided as his ship had been divided explosively and sunk. Old/new William. She never learned which of them had the secret death wish.

P
riest Howard's last will and testament was read in his lawyer's office on the third floor of the West State National Bank, in which Priest had been the majority stockholder, at ten o'clock on Friday morning.

It went as Leland had predicted to himself. The homestead was Saxby's, with the provision that, should Sax and his family choose not to live there, the property was to be sold, proceeds held in trust for however many children Rose Heidi had the stamina to bear before calling it quits. Leland knew that Sax would have the homestead appraised and on the market before sundown that day. But it wouldn't be so easy to get shut of, a big old house in a somnolent community; probably it would still be sitting there unsold after probate was completed. Mixed blessings indeed.

Cash money and stock certificates were apportioned by the estate for the continuing care of Priest's third wife, who had outlived him, barely; she was confined to an expensive nursing home, brought down by a catastrophic stroke a year and a half ago, now helpless as baby Moses in the bulrushes. The loyal Burnell was to receive four thousand dollars, and there were lesser bequests to a housemaid and cook. Leland shifting a little in his chair, listening disinterestedly as the vault of his late father's largess was emptied, gold toothpick going from one corner of his mouth to the other. He didn't smoke anymore but it was occasions like this that made him sorry he'd quit.

Leland's father had been generous in his givings to his church and his alma mater, Vanderbilt University, and many charitable and other worthy organizations, down to and including the Boy Scouts of America.

Most of his mistresses, when he still could get the drop on some pussy, had been married women; all were spared the necessity of trying to make explanations for windfalls to their husbands.

After the lawyer had finished droning his way through the unnecessarily wordy four-page document, there was a drowsy silence in his office, all of the others present trying to avoid looking at Leland, who jauntily rolled that toothpick around on his lower lip. Sax was sweating. To Leland's mind Sax was the disinherited one, since birth. As for wit, unarmed; as for looks, beggared. Leland could afford his smile.

Rose Heidi fanned herself, content that her children were provided for, but some cash would have been nice too. The water cooler in one corner belched. A bluebottle fly was buzzing on a windowpane. The ugly black oscillating fan atop a bookcase behind the lawyer's desk smelled as if it were on the verge of burning up. Pages of the will stirred in the lawyer's chubby liver-spotted hand in the stale gusts from the tickety fan blades.

Leland, still smiling, popped his toothpick into a leather holder in his shirt pocket, reached for his hat and stood up.

"Fuck you too, Daddy," he said in response to Priest Howard's posthumous belittlement of him and strolled out of the office, no defeat in the angle of his head; like any good politician, Leland knew how to act the part of a man who has the fatted calf by the balls.

Behind him, Rose Heidi cut loose with a nervous, malicious-sounding giggle.

F
riday noon Mally's second cousin, Verona, came around with a bushel of tomatoes that needed putting up, not the kind of activity Mally was looking for on a day when the mercury in her nailed-up porch thermometer held steady at just under one hundred degrees.

No cross-ventilation and pots of tomatoes boiling, it was a steambath in the kitchen she and Verona needed to step out of every so often to keep from fainting. On the front porch and out of the sun the air felt almost cool. They unwrapped their soggy headrags, took off seedy aprons, and drank water with squeezes of lemon in it from a pitcher. Mally didn't have enough lemons to make real lemonade, and she needed all of her sugar for those jars of tomato preserves.

Her print cotton dress was wet down the back and clinging to her thighs. Verona fanned herself with a folded copy of the
Tri-State Defender
newspaper. All Mally wanted was to sit very still for a few minutes and breathe slowly.

They finished with the tomatoes at a quarter to four.

Verona took a bucket bath and drove home with her half of the still-hot jars in an orange crate on the seat of a fuming '36 Ford pickup. Mally coaxed the temperamental pump in the wellhouse to deliver a tepid shower in her bathtub. Her cistern was empty and the well considerably down in a dry year. Then she used a lot of talcum, put on a T-shirt and a pair of overalls ragged at the cuffs. Barefoot on the porch, a bread board across her lap, she wrote her weekly letter to her father at the medical school in Nashville. All the gossip about people and relations he hadn't seen, probably hadn't given a thought to, in donkey's years.

She heard a bicycle bell, looked up and saw Alex Gambier in the yard beside half of a whitewashed truck tire that was planted with geraniums.

"See you got that bike fixed," Mally called. "Well, come on up." She had almost finished her letter anyway.

He leaned his bike against the wide stump of a long-gone gum tree and joined her on the porch. He had heat rash on his neck. Sweat rolled in big drops from beneath the unruly shock of coarse blond hair and down the sides of his face. Mally calculated the ride from his house was about nine miles. Overfar in such heat. No point in pouring him a tin cup of water; he was perishing. She just handed over the nearly full pitcher and watched him gulp. Then she took the pitcher away.

"Too much all at once gives you cramps," Mally warned. Alex nodded. She poured a little water into a cupped hand and sluiced his face, wiping it down. He held still for that, closing his eyes, licking lips that looked raw in places. "Now wait here," she said. "Rest yourself. When that water's run through you, you know where the outhouse is." He hunched his shoulders, remembering cobwebs in the dark two nights ago. Mally smiled.

She returned from her bathroom with cornstarch for the heat rash, petroleum jelly for his lips, and the ring he'd left there. He took it from her and put it on, looking not at all surprised where the ring had turned up. Mally read him plainly.

"If you want to come visit now and then, no need to go leavin' anything behind as an excuse." She paused, spoke again to chase the consternation from his eyes. "You're always welcome here. If you're just wanting a place to get away to."

He looked at her in rapt contemplation, looked away to where small green lizards had arranged themselves on rusty screen wire, a watchful hieroglyph.

"That ring belong to your Daddy? Must have kept it in a safety-deposit box; doesn't appear to have been damaged by the fire."

Alex nodded slightly, blinking, flash of curiosity in his humid face. She knew about that?

Mally handed him the jar of petroleum jelly.

"Fix up those lips, why don't you? And you better had avoid the sun next couple of days; got to take care of a fair complexion. All right with me if you want to stay on for supper; might cool down by then. Cornbread and butterbeans the best I can do. Some nice green tomatoes. Probably they feed you better at your house."

He made a wry face, dipped a finger into the petroleum jelly and smoothed it over his crusty lips.

"Now you can powder on some of that cornstarch to take the hurt out of your rash. Then if we don't have anything else to talk about, I could use some help cleanin' up the mess in my kitchen, I put up a bushel tomatoes here today."

Alex looked at her with terrific disdain. Mally put a hand on her hip and cocked her head.