Skinned Alive (6 page)

Pearl said it right out. She was intelligent enough to recognize how funny it was, but as the local chair of the Texas Historical Society, she took pride in every detail of their heritage. The miles and miles of brand-new housing developments Luke had seen on the Dallas-Fort Worth Beltway, all with purely arbitrary names such as Mount Vernon or Versailles, had spooked him, made him grateful for these sun-bleached lean-tos, for the irises growing in the crick, for the tabernacle, that open-sided, roofed-over meeting place above the town.

He and Beth sat for hours and hours with their great-aunts, “visiting” after their supper of fried chicken and succotash. They drank their sweetened iced tea and traded stories. There were solemn moments, as when the old ladies hugged Beth and told her how courageous she was being.

“That Greg was a fine man,” Ruby said, her eyes defiant and sharp as though someone might challenge her judgment. Her enunciation had always been clear—she’d taught elocution for years in high schools all over the state—but she hadn’t weeded the country out of her voice.

Then there were the cheerful moments, as when Luke recounted the latest follies of folks in Paris. “Well, I declare,” the ladies would exclaim, their voices dipping from pretended excitement down into real indifference. He was careful not to go on too long about a world they didn’t know or care about or to shock them. He noticed they didn’t ask him this time when he was going to get hitched up: perhaps he’d gone over that invisible line in their minds and become a “confirmed” bachelor. They did tease him about his “bay window,” which he patted as though he hadn’t noticed it before, which made them laugh.

Beth and he went on a long walk before the light died. They
had a look at the folks on the corner they’d heard about who lived like pigs; the old man had gone and shot someone dead and now he was in the pokey for life, and the old woman—didn’t it beat all—had a garden sale going on every day, but who would want that old junk? He and Beth walked fast, with light hearts. He appreciated their shared views—they both loved and respected their aunts and they were both glad to slip away from them.

They walked down to see the old metal swing bridge; earlier Ruby had shown them a photo of Billy Andrews, in their class of 1917, swinging from the bridge as a stunt, big grin on his face, fairly popping out of his graduation suit with the celluloid collar, his strong calves squeezed into the knickers.

Oh, Luke ached for sex. He thought that if he could just lie next to a man one more time, feel once more that someone wanted him, he could die in peace. All his life he’d been on the prowl, once he’d broken his vows of virginity—in French he’d learned there were two words for boy virgins, neither comical:
un puceau
and
un rosier
, as though the boy were a rose bush, blossoms guarded by thorns. He’d lived so fast, cherished so little, but now he lingered over sexy memories he’d never even summoned up before, like that time he’d followed a Cuban night watchman into a Park Avenue office building and they’d fucked in the service elevator and stopped, just for the hell of it, on every one of the forty-two floors. Or he remembered sex that hadn’t happened, like that summer when he was twelve, a caddie, and he’d sat next to one of the older caddies on the bench waiting for a job in the airless, cricket-shrill heat. He’d molded his leg so perfectly to the guy’s thigh that finally he’d stood up and said to Luke, real pissed off, “What are you, some sort of fuckin’ Liberace?” And he thought of the cop who’d handcuffed him to the bedstead.

As he and Beth were walking out past a field of cows standing in the fading light, he started picking a bouquet of wildflowers
for Ruby—he got up to twenty-nine flowers without repeating a single variety. Beth walked with vigor, her whole body alert with curiosity. She’d always struck him as a healthy, sexy woman. He wondered if she’d remarry. With her religion and all she couldn’t just pick up a man in a bar. She’d have to marry again to get laid. But would she want to? How did she keep her appetite in check?

The next day was hot enough to make them all worry what the summer would bring. They were going to what was called the “graveyard working,” ten miles east of Hershell. Once a year the ten or so families who had kin buried there came together to set the tombstones upright, hoe and rake, stick silk or plastic flowers in the soil—real ones burned up right away—and then eat. Ruby and Pearl had both been up for hours cooking, since after the graveyard working everyone shared in a big potluck lunch.

They drove out in Beth’s Cadillac. Ruby was wearing a bonnet, one she’d made herself for gardening. The cemetery, which was also named after Hershell since he’d donated the land, was on top of a hill looking over green, rolling farmland. There were ten or eleven cars and pickup trucks already parked outside the metal palings that guarded the front but not the sides of the cemetery. Big women with lots of kids were already setting up for the lunch, unfolding card tables and stacking them with coolers of iced tea and plates of chicken fried in broken-potato-chip batter, potato salad, pickled watermelon rind, whole hams, black-eyed peas, loaves of Wonder Bread, baked beans served right out of the can and pecan pies and apple pies. There weren’t more than a hundred graves altogether and all of them had already been decently looked after, thanks to the contributions solicited every year by Ruby, who hired a part-time caretaker.

Luke felt a strange contentment hoeing his grandfather’s grave. Pearl had to show him how to hoe, but she didn’t tease him about being a city slicker. He realized he could do no wrong in her eyes, since he was kin. Everyone here was kin. Several of the men had Luke’s beaky red nose. He kept seeing his own small, well-knit body on other men—the same narrow shoulders and short legs, hairless forearms, the thinning, shiny hair gone to baldness here and there. Because of the rift in the family he’d met few of these people before and he had little enough in common with them, except he did share the same body type, possibly the same temperament.

His grandfather had been a Woodsman of the World, whatever that was, and his tomb marker was a stone tree trunk. His wife was buried under a tablet that read “She Did the Best She Could.”

Beth was standing in front of Greg’s grave, which was still fresh. Luke worried that her mission to England might shake her faith. Wouldn’t she see how flimsy, how recent and, well, how corny her religion was once she was in that gray and unpleasant land? They were planning, the Southern Baptists, to fan out over the English countryside. Wouldn’t Beth be awed, or at least dismayed, by Gloucester Cathedral, by the polished intricacy of its cloisters? Wouldn’t she see how raw, raw as this fresh grave, her beliefs were beside the civilized ironies of the Church of England? It was as though she were trying to introduce Pop-Tarts into the land of scones.

During the picnic Beth told Luke that her one worry about her son Houston was that he always seemed so serious and distracted these days, as though dipped and twirled in darkness. “I tell him, ‘Son, you must be
happy
in the Lord. The Bible tells us to be happy in our faith.’”

Luke couldn’t resist tweaking Beth for a moment. He asked her what she thought about the scandals—adultery, group-sex
parties, embezzled church funds—surrounding a popular television evangelist and his wife.

“I expected it.”

“You did?”

“Yes, it’s good. It’s a good sign. It shows that Satan is establishing his rule, which means that we’ll live to see the Final Days, the Rapture of the Church.” She spoke faster and with more assurance than usual. Luke realized she probably saw his disease as another proof of Satan’s reign or God’s punishment. He knew the Texas legislature was considering imprisoning diseased homosexuals who continued having sex.

Ruby came up to them, energized by the event, and asked him if he’d marked off a plot for himself. “You can, you know. Doesn’t cost a penny”—she pronounced it “pinny.” “You just put stones around where you want to be. Up here it’s all filling up but out yonder we’ve got lots to go.”

“No,” Luke said. “I want to be cremated and put in the Columbarium at Père Lachaise. In Paris.”

“I declare,” Ruby said, “but you’ve got years and
years
to reconsider,” and she laughed.

That night, as the ladies visited and told family stories, Luke felt trapped and isolated. Beth sat there nodding and smiling and saying, “Auntie Pearl, now you just sit and let me.” But he knew she was lonely, too, and maybe a bit frightened.

Other old ladies, all widows, stopped in to visit, and Luke wondered if Beth was ready to join grief’s hen club. Girls started out clinging together, whispering secrets and flouncing past boys. Then there was the longish interlude of marriage, followed by the second sorority of widowhood; all these humped necks, bleary eyes, false teeth, the wide-legged sitting posture of country women sipping weak coffee and complaining about
one another. “She wanted to know what I paid for this place and I said, ‘Well, Jessie, it is so
good
of you to worry about my finances, but I already have Mr. Hopkins at Farmers First to look after that for me,’ and don’t you know but that shut her up fast?” On and on into the night, not really vicious but complaining, naturally good but studiously petty, often feisty, sometimes coquettish, these women talked on and on. Those who couldn’t hear nodded while their eyes timidly wandered, like children dismissed from the table but forbidden to play in their Sunday best.

Luke imagined he and Beth were both longing for a man—she for Greg, he for one of his men, one of these divorced cowboys, the sort of heartbroken man Randy Travis or George Strait sings about…. They’d met a man like that during their walk past the old bridge yesterday—a sunburned man whose torso sat comfortably on his hips as though in a big, roomy saddle. This sunburned rancher had known who they were; the whole town had been alerted to their visit. He didn’t exactly doff his hat to Beth but he took it off slowly and stared into it as he spoke in a deep, nearly inaudible Texas voice. Without his hat on he looked kinder, which, for Luke, made him less sexy. When he left he swung up into his truck and pulled it into gear all in one motion. He hadn’t been at the graveyard working, although Luke had looked for him.

The next morning they drove a hundred miles west to Henderson, where Beth’s mother, Aunt Olna, still lived. Her husband, now dead, had been a brother of Luke’s dad—estranged because Luke’s dad had married a Mex and become an “old” Catholic (for some reason people hereabouts always smiled sourly, lifted one eyebrow and said in one breath, as though it were a bound form, “old-Catholic”). Beth’s mother had grown up Church of Christ but had converted to her husband’s religion years after their marriage. One day she’d simply read a pamphlet about what Baptists believed and she’d said to
herself, “Well, that’s what I believe, too,” and had crossed over on the spot.

Aunt Olna was always harsh to Beth, ordering her around: “Not that one, Elizabeth.” “That one which, Mother?” Beth would wail. Beth’s mother was too “nervous” to specify her demands. “Turn here,” she’d say in the car. “Turn right or left, Mother? Mother? Right or left?” Olna was also too nervous to cook. She didn’t tremble, as other nervous people did. Luke figured the nervousness must be a confusion hidden deep in a body made fat from medication. Because she couldn’t cook she’d taken three hundred dollars out of the bank to entertain them. She named the sum over and over again. She was proud her husband had left her “well fixed.” When Beth drove to the store, Olna said, “Greg left Beth very well fixed. House all bought and paid for. A big
in
-surance policy. She need never worry.”

Aunt Olna liked Luke. She’d always told everyone Luke was about as good as a person could get. Of course she knew almost nothing about his life, but she’d clung to her enthusiasm over the years and he’d always felt comfortable with her. And she wasn’t given to gushing. When he’d praised her house, she’d said, “Everything in it is from the dime store. Always was.” She told him how she’d inherited a dining-room “suit” but had had to sell it because it was too fine for her house.

Even so he liked the shiny maple furniture in the front parlor, the flimsy metal TV dinner trays on legs used as side tables, the knubby milk-glass candy dishes filled with Hershey’s kisses. He liked the reproduction of the troubadour serenading the white-wigged girl, a sort of East Texas take on Watteau. He liked the fact there was no shower, just a big womanly tub, and that the four-poster bed in his room was so tall you had to climb up to get into it. Best of all he liked leaving his door open onto the night.

The rain steamed the sweetness up out of the mown grass
and the leaves of the big old shade trees kept up a frying sound; when the rain died down it sounded as though someone had lowered the flame under the skillet. He was surrounded by women and death and yet the rain dripping over an old Texas town of darkened houses made him feel like a boy in his early teens again, a boy dying to slip away to find men. These days, of course, desire entailed hopelessness—he’d learned to match every pant of longing with a sigh of regret.

The next day the heat turned the sweet smell sour, as though spring peas had been replaced with rancid collard greens. Olna took them to lunch at a barbecue place where they ate ribs and hot biscuits. In the afternoon they drove to a nursing home to visit Olna’s sister. That woman remembered having babysat Luke once twenty-five years ago. “My, you were a cute little boy. I wish I could see you, honey. I’d give anything to see you again. My little house just sits empty and I’d love to go back to it, but I can’t, I can’t see to mind it. I don’t know why the good Lord won’t gather me in. Not no use to
no
one.”

The waiting room had a Coke machine and a snack dispenser. One of the machines was making a nasty whine. The woman’s hand looked as pale as if it’d been floured through a sifter.

“My husband left me,” she was saying, “and after that I sold tickets at the movie the-ay-tur for nine dollars a week, six days a week, on Saturdays from ten till midnight, and when I asked for a raise after ten years, Mr. Monroe said no.” She smiled. “But I had my house and cat and I could see.”