Tomato Red (11 page)

The woman’s car sat in the drive, and it was a glistening blue boat of a car, a Caddy, and its presence in our dirt-rut drive asked the question, What’s wrong with this picture? The woman had gone into the powder room, but not to powder from the sounds of it. She’d had a shampoo, a set, a manicure, and had gotten so flirty toward Jason with her words and tone and squeezing fingers that he’d started to freak.

I whispered, “Put your hand on her thigh.”

“Then what?”

“Uh, well, slide your hand up under her skirt, there, and say, ‘How ’bout I take your temperature, ma’am?’ ”

“
What?
”

Jamalee shoved me and made a sound of pity.

“That’s awful, Sammy. That’s pitiful. That might work on the pigs you’ve gone with but, huh-uh, not with this gal.”

“What then?” There were beads of sweat in his voice. “And give it to me quick. I hear the toilet paper rolling.”

“Jason,” I said, “don’t do anything except respond. All you’ve got to do is stand still,
don’t run
, and give her a smile or two. Believe me, she’ll ransack you on her own any minute now—she’s probably in the john puttin’ her thing in.”

“Her wh—?”

The woman wore heels that took charge as she walked, went
snap snap snap
across the floor. Her smell reached out to me—outside, there, even, on the dirt—and it did the job. That smell set a mood, set a mood so I wanted to sprint in there and tell Jason to scamper his fabulous skinny ass out of the way and let the big dog eat.

His face through the screen expressed doom.

He turned to face the footsteps.

“Now, Mrs. Mallahan, perhaps I should practice my head-and-neck massage. Would you care for a cup of tea first?”

“What I’d care for, tiger, is if you’d call me Linda, as I keep askin’.”

“Okay, Linda. I have herbal tea or regular-tea tea.”

“Sit by me on the couch, there, tiger, and explain herbal flavors to me. I’m a bourbon person, most often. You, pretty fella, are takin’ me to new places.”

“You sure you want me to—uh, you know, sit by you? Linda?”

Those footsteps started snapping.

“Did I sound like I was confused about what I want?”

He started to follow.

“Not too much.”

He was, I think, guessin’ every inch of the way. Jason, I’m sure, hadn’t had any pussy since pussy had him. He’s on the couch, there, pretty quick,
guessing
his way toward her fulfillment, throwing every guess he’s got at the woman, and he
only had one guess or two in his bag to start with. All he had to offer her was his beauty and that so-so desire.

Me and Jamalee are anxious lumps beside the stoop, at the ready to give coaching instructions during any time-outs. Our spot is under the porch rail. There are bugs under there, cobwebs and fallen wasp combs, and old sharp-edged bottle tops you discover suddenly with your butt.

“Did you ever even ask that boy if he
could
fuck a woman?”

“I don’t
ask
questions I don’t want to hear the answer of.”

The sky had turned ash gray and greasy with sweat, like a heart attack was coming up from the south. The dirt smelled inviting. The sounds from the couch carried through the tiny shack and sifted out the screen door, down to us where we squatted.

“It’s never just life,” Jamalee said. As she listened to her brother and the woman, her posture became one of low tide, drained and slack. “It’s always a tired-ass
lesson
from life.”

 

DOORS HAD BEEN slammed shut in the dream house.

The three of us moped in the kitchen, Jamalee chewing her lips and Jason drying his eyes, trying to breathe slow and wipe the red from his face.

He said, “I
knew
it. I
knew
it would be like
that
.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not
all
bad.”

“I’ll
never
be normal now.”

“Kid, you weren’t
ever
goin’ to be normal. Not you. Normal belongs to other folks.”

A passing train cast its spell, put us on hold where we stood, took time from our lives and ate it. The spell was long, loud, welcome.

Jason dunked his head in the sink again, washing his face for the eighty-seventh time or close to it. That woman had worked the boy like a rented mule that hated the work and kept trying to run toward open pasture and had to be reined in hard and bossed.

At the end she’d giggled and giggled and called him “Dear child.”

It didn’t occur to her, apparently, to leave him a wad of cash.

“I suppose what we’ll do,” Jamalee said, “is we’ll just the three of us have us a nice sad pity party. We’ll cower here, shiver and shake, and share stories about our weaknesses. All the lame things about us that make us
pointless
. Which we are, we’re
pointless
.”

“Now listen,” Jason said. His voice ran high on him. “If
you
want, Sis, we can be totally honest about
you
—
brutally
honest, even—but I’d very much prefer it if we’d keep
sugar-coating
anything said about
me
. Is that so much to expect?”

Beyond the screen door I spotted this snake. A milk snake, I’d say. It came into view from near where we’d squatted as trash cans. The snake went by slow and unconcerned, as if it thought it was playing a round of golf or something. I saw it ripple toward a grass knot and suddenly it was gone, totally gone, as if it had never been there, like a truth you didn’t tell.

In a short time it became only me and Jamalee standing there. She had half circles of dirt dusted on her smock where her squatting butt had met the dirt. Dust moons as a designer’s touch. They drew my eyes.

“I’ll need a job,” Tomato Red said. “My brother won’t do at all as a stud.”

“I had my doubts,” I said. I raised my hands to my flattop, then rubbed the fenders. “But he’s got these other talents.”

“So, I’ll get a job, raise the money that way. I can get a job, how about you?”

“They’ll have to hang me first. Then I’ll hunt up some sort of grunt work. Grunt work is my main calling, but I like to be dead when I do it.”

“Aw, shit, Sammy, that future sounds awful.” This was a sorry day for baby Jam, the day the transmission fell plumb out of her plan. It left her skittery and raw and wondering. “It’s not right.”

“Ah,” I said, “we
are
havin’ one.”

“One what?”

“Pity party. Like you said:
my
lifelong boo-hoos,
your
lifelong boo-hoos; we’ll celebrate them, talk them out into the complete wide open.”

Oh, now Jamalee did
not
care for my comment. She gave me a look that suggested she just might dismiss gravity or some such until I learned my fuckin’ place. I won’t claim she managed to do that, but if I did it’d certainly make a fresh excuse for me. No?

YOU WEREN’T BORN choking on no silver spoon, you know how it goes when you go looking for a job and you need one: You wait in the first indifferent room, ink in the forms, apply in another room with linoleum that’s waxy and squeaks and overhead lights that don’t miss a thing; then there’s the desk and the person behind it who thinks he’s an admiral, or it’s a she and she thinks she’s now in line for the throne to somewhere, and next you’re kissing ass and aw-shucksing toward the desk, telling how bad all your life you’ve been wanting to be night janitor in a chemical plant, or hog wrangler in a slaughterhouse, or pizza delivery boy, how you’ve laid awake in bed gettin’ goose bumps just from
imagining
how high and wide your life might someday be lived if ever you
could
average five dollars and forty cents an hour.

But there’re these questions, as always: Could you explain what you did from February of that one year until July of the next? And also that other year, from May to September?

Oh, did I not write that down? you say, then start spinning phantom jobs out your mouth, and they’re the best you ever did have, too: roller-coaster operator at Six Flags; Delta guide and driver for that two-part
National Geographic
article; day bartender at Silky O’Sullivan’s.

Your palms break sweat and you sit there, needy, while your work ethic and character are available for comment
from strangers you wouldn’t share a joint with at a blues festival.

And you don’t get the job.

Those old failings showed through.

Not even lies helped.

Before all that long, you start telling those near to you that you went on interviews that turned out sorry when factually you never even made the phone call.

Jamalee dwindled out of hope in a few days longer than I’d taken to dwindle. We sat in the kitchen quite a bit after that and let the heat kick our asses so we didn’t have to do it. I worked on the remains of a case of beer a client had left next door. I think it had warmed in his car too long.

Our new values were hard to hang on to during a time of such stress. Of an evening, or just any ol’ time, really, Jamalee would say such things as “I guess banks are a bad idea these days,” or “There
was
a chop shop over past Cabool—they’d probably put us to work,” or “I don’t imagine you know of any wacky well-to-do folks who keep their mattress stuffed with twenty-dollar bills, do you, Sammy?”

I never answered out loud, merely made faces.

That gun was in the house, on her mind, and at each sunset I could feel we’d edged a bit closer to outright crime.

Already I could hear steel doors clanging and smell a lunch tray of shit-on-a-shingle and taste weak tea.

Then came that evening when the sunset depicted pink fingers raking a general blue and the ad appeared in
The Scroll
: Waitress position at Country Club. Nice atmosphere, $ potential.

 

WEST TABLE, MO., is a town that exists sure enough—it’s all there, the houses and shops and traffic lights, the church spires and shotgun shacks—but it’s not a town that stands
out special from all the other towns you’ve drove past without slowing down. The country club perched where the town once ended, though now more new but not special town has popped up to curl around it.

The lane leading in has great tall pine trees edging it, giving off that wonderful shade those trees give and that smell that makes you want to nap and dream. A golf course occupied both sides of the lane. The lane had been paved black and awful smooth.

“I don’t know about this,” Jamalee said.

Jason leaned up and patted her head.

“Just be yourself and smile.”

“Be myself,” she said. “Be myself—that’s what has got me to here.”

Her hair belonged yet in a garden; she’d brushed on a green eye shadow and painted her lips a red one shade lighter red than her hair, the kind that makes lips look wet. Golden hoop earrings dangled. She wore a short, short black dress with bare shoulders and a snug fit. Spike heels elevated her above the category of midget.

The country club building lolled amongst a handsome stand of elder pines. The place had three levels but not in a stack, sort of in a spread, with a separate patio area at each level. The patios had round glass tables with, like, seaside umbrellas over them, striped real bright. The outside walls were of wood and native Ozark stone. The wood had been painted cream.

There were sounds from a swimming pool I couldn’t see.

“Oh, man, I don’t want to go in there.”

I found a space and parked.

“Jam,” I said, “we can stay or we can go.”

“I can’t just go. I must go in. I just must.”

“So, do what you’ve got to do, or hush up about it, one.”

The girl eased from the car, inhaled mightily, and went toward the door walking strong, stabbing those spike heels with every step. She kept her chin in the air and sent her body after it.

 

IT GOT NEAR to lunchtime and the parking lot filled. The members drove a lot of lush vehicles, mostly big-assed things a sharecropper could’ve raised a family in. There were some trucks with extended cabs and bloated wheels and several low-slung sporty chariots.

I had taken a seat on a narrow log rail that bordered the parking lot, beneath the pines in the casket-smelling shade. I avoided eye contact with the members who went by, plenty of them wearing golf cleats so they sounded like slow ponies on a hard road.

Jason had decided to walk inside, see what the delay was, tell Jamalee we’re getting hungry getting hot.

In a short time the two glass doors shove open the way saloon doors at cowboy bars did, and Jamalee stomps out with a pair of men flanking her. She’s poking those spike heels down like she’s trying to stab through to a vital organ.

She says, her neck tense, “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you what
I
think is ridiculous—you assholes are. That’s what.”

“That’s fine,” one fella says. Both fellas are dressed in that summertime-casual look that would be mighty dressy down in Venus Holler. “Just leave the club’s property, miss.”

“Yeah,” the other one says, “you’re giving the members a sight to have nightmares over.”

People coming in and people coming out began to stop. An amused little crowd was acquired. There were diamond rings, gold watches, shoes so ugly they must’ve cost a pretty penny, and Redneck Riviera tans. These folks were up high in the pay scales and insisted that you know it.

“I already got nightmares,” Jam said, “and you assholes are in every one.”

“You want me to call the police? I will. I’ll call the police. Is that what you want?”

“I want you to kiss my ass and call it orchid.”

“Every time you open your mouth, miss, you show why you don’t belong here, in the club.”

Soon as I got over there, close to Jam, I saw Jason coming through the crowd from behind. The crowd sensed he was with her, I guess, and gave way, until he stood beside his sis.