Lucinderella, p.10
Lucinderella, page 10
She shook her head and sipped the coke. “It wouldn’t have tempted me. All people want to read about is fornication,” crunching some ice pellets in her strong teeth.
She said, “You have to put in at least one sex recipe—what and when and how much—as if you were telling them how to make zabaglione or beef Stroganoff. You have to be able to talk about Erogenous Zones as easily as you talk about Kitchen Bouquet for making gravy. If you can’t, the word gets round in spite of all the publishers can do; you can’t fool people with naked book jackets any more. It creates a sort of censorship as constricting as the poor Russians having to write about the State. Oh, you don’t know what a relief it is, Cliff, not to have to worry about where the next book is coming from,” stretching up her arms in freedom, “the next damn copulation.”
I told her she was home now, she didn’t have to go on using such words. “We wouldn’t hold it against you. You said you were sick of them anyhow.” She said yes, yes, yes, but you couldn’t cut off all of a sudden like that or you got the shakes. I said, “It couldn’t be that you want to keep your hand in? Just in case?” She said of course the hell not, and I confided that I had thought at first she might be coming back because she had run out of stories up there, coming back to the woodpile for another armload of logs. “Don’t you really miss your typewriter? Honestly?”
“I miss it the way I’d miss a wart on my—on my nose that had been taken off with an electric needle. Leaving no scar. Dear old Dr. Yski said—you know, he looked so bad by the time I left I said, ‘Now, Zyggy, don’t you want to stretch out there and let me listen while you talk about yourself?’ He said, ‘I’ll mees you, Lucy, every single wan of you.’ And he kissed me with his ticklish beard, right on the mouth. In fact, if you must know, he licked——”
I told her I didn’t need to know all the details and she said she couldn’t bother carrying around secrets any more and her life was an open—she started to say “book” and changed it to “record.” I reminded her she had been about to tell me something the dear old doctor had said and she said, “Oh yes. He said politics might be a nice way for me to begin a new life, that I had said I liked politics. I said I hadn’t said any such bug-eyed thing, but he showed me the note where I said I was sick of politics and basketball and I had to hush. But I’ve been thinking Lester could help me with politics. I don’t have the reach for basketball.”
I said, “Lucy, let’s just hold everything for a minute.” But I didn’t get to go on because I saw Bivins up at the cigar counter, saw him pick up his two packs of cigars, claw up his change like peanuts in a bowl and turn round and walk as straight to us as if he had set us down there a minute before to wait for him. Lucinda said, “How nice!” and slid over beneath a display of bathing caps and bargains in mineral oil. He offered her a cigar with his heavy-handed humor, which I was glad (and surprised) to see her decline. “Given them up,” she said.
Bivins hardly waited to get seated, swiping aside his rayon tie that had grown a third longer with many tyings: “What’s the Big Chief trying to do up there in the Wigwam? Turn our God-blessed happy home into a disorderly house?”
It rocked me. For him to have the information was bad enough but to spring it like this, and with an interpretation that was enough to send us to him begging him to hear and accept the truth. There was a little comfort perhaps in seeing that Lucinda had already heard it on some date or other, or part of it; she said, “That’s what I meant, Clamp! You shouldn’t say such things about Uncle Brownell, Bivins.”
“No?” Bivins said. “What do you say when Daddy starts bringing his fancy lady home with him?” I told him I didn’t believe it, asked him who had said such ridiculous things, thinking all the while that wherever he had got it he hadn’t got all of it, not the lease angle and possibly not a full list of the guests. “Deacon of the church!” he said. “Trustee of the estate! Legal guardian of two innocent young girls!” I said, “All right, all right.”
“Does he think a court would uphold such morals in a trustee? Or in a guardian of two minors—two toothsome minors? Do you, Spignor?”
I told him to ask Judge Fluther, not me; it was a legal question, mostly trying to see how far his information carried, and he said, “Nunkie!” with considerable disfavor and went on that Uncle Brownell was riding for a fall. “Does he think the church will uphold a Deacon in something like that? Bringing this woman home? For a game of cribbage, perhaps?”
Lucinda said, “I’m sick of hearing about screwing and let me out of here.” The word seemed to hit Bivins with about the same force it hit me; it propelled him out into the aisle, Lucy sliding after him. I think it was in her mind to leave us both to argue it out but I wasn’t ready for that; I grabbed the check, gave Bivins as dirty a look as I could manage without much preparation, and escaped.
She wouldn’t talk about it at all. I don’t know whether she heard what I was saying or not but I said several things to the effect that he was obviously trying to blackmail Uncle Brownell, had always been after him in one way or another and might even be hoping, Lord help us, to get himself named trustee in his place. As we walked in on our cool bricks Lucinda said, raising her voice a little on account of Big Ma’s Channels, “Exactly where was it he shot Uncle Laban’s leg off?” I showed her. It was quite reassuring that that was what she was thinking of.
V
Those were great days in our town to be on the Chamber of Commerce or the Committee of One Hundred or in one of the civic clubs. As the parking spaces along our curbs disappeared and the cars lined up at every stoplight and the Wrecker-Service garages went on a round-the-clock schedule (“For Your Greater Convenience,” as one pointed out), the Chamber could hardly contain itself for joy and the Committee of One Hundred failed altogether and had to move into the Masonic Building. And when an out-of-town traffic engineer, speaking before the combined clubs at a banquet at the Jonathan Copp, prophesied that within five years the cars and trucks on our Broad Street would stretch solid from one red light to the next the applause rattled our ballroom windows like the storm of ’46; it sounded from the pantry like Old Three-o-two slamming in over one of the canal trestles. Even though, not long after this, we had our first full-fledged kidnapping and got a nice paragraph in Time and Newsweek (Time considered it an outcropping of the natural criminal instincts of Southerners—white Southerners, that is; WASPs), it was not until a Chicago-Miami gambling syndicate spotted our climbing index and located one of their main plants with us that we felt we were really getting somewhere. It had taken us a long time to get started (Oglethorpe founded us in 1735) but it looked as if at last we were cranked up and on the road. The boy from Indianapolis who borrowed the Famous-Friendly’s gun to hold up the shop had heard about us, he said, before he left home.
The reasons for this long-delayed change of fortune were simple enough. Though our section was not as far from Russia and China as Northern industries would have liked, it was about as far as they could get without interfering with the moon shot and the Florida tourist trade and they were moving down; the Northern press dutifully tried to warn them of the primitive conditions, the privations they would be forcing on their helpless personnel, the risks to plant and inventory from hurricanes and fires in the pine forests (one mentioned the Charleston earthquake—Uncle Brownell’s father had remembered it well—and another the yellow fever epidemic of 1837 in which Dr. Jim had so distinguished himself), but the industries kept coming. Georgia was very popular with paper mills, though when we met and upped the tax concessions being offered by neighboring towns and were told we might be awarded a mill of our own, some of the weaker stomachs among us protested at the smell fallout, which they claimed would register on a Geiger counter at thirty miles. From then on we used “cellulose plant” instead of “paper mill,” which made everybody feel better; we also encouraged the more healthy attitude of the better businessmen, who liked to say, “It smells like money to me.” Judge Fluther said at the time that it looked as if we were going to have our very own paper-stink, and the subsequent breezes from our environs bore him out—from what we called “Miracle Mile,” where more and more industries were happily digging foundations in our sticky but tax-free clay.
In addition to these private industries, landed or on the hook, the Federal Government had moved in and, as I’ve said, built the Bum Plant; adding these payrolls to the payroll at the training camp a considerable flow of new funds was channeled in to us out of the pockets of Northern and Western taxpayers, enough to take care of most of the regret we naturally felt at our consequent unpopularity—which we were reminded of every time the train backed in with the metropolitan papers.
There had been a few tense moments not long before Lucinda returned, in the matter of the superhighway. The Federal and State governments had built the road as far as they had any right to go, that is up to the city limits on one side and to the far bank of the river on the other. This was fair enough with us: six lanes of cash and travelers’ checks from two directions joined by a devious but well-marked route using our streets and the old bridge. But they weren’t satisfied with that; they wanted to connect the two ends in a straight shot.
We figured there was no sense in the world in that, a good many of us; no sooner had we hung up all our new traffic lights and got the town nicely filled with cars and out-of-town money than here come the State and Federal people trying to talk us into giving them the right of way so they could drain it all off. They called us a bottleneck, dangerous bottleneck. There was no bottleneck, everything flowing smoothly with the lights; and nowhere nearly as much danger doing it our way as doing it theirs. Our way let you come up to the ends of the superhighway at seventy, then, instead of continuing at seventy and being over the river on the new bridge they were talking about in three-quarters of a minute and gone with all your money still folded up tight, we let you ease down a long ramp to a series of arrows that took you on a little trip round the city at a reasonable pace, let you buy a load of gas, some dark glasses, a round of Happy Hamburgers, a few diapers if you were a family man, maybe buy the children a movie and spend the night and get to the other ramp the next morning refreshed and lighter by thirty or forty dollars (not counting any bargains our patrolmen might have let you have in traffic tickets). You can’t make any progress in a town if you just keep stirring the same money round and round; you’ve got to have new money running in and it’s a hard matter to have too much.
Why they thought they could persuade us to help them fix it so we wouldn’t stop any of this new money I don’t know but they did think so and they worked up all kinds of names to call us, Mossbacks and Reactionaries and Crackpots, all because we didn’t take to standing down below and watching all that cash shooting through on the overpasses—a good proposition for the North-South motorists perhaps, but why should we look out for them? Some of us were in favor of letting them have not the straight shot (going, as I’ve said, practically through my bedroom) but the right of way along one of our streets; let them repave it if they wanted to, we wouldn’t quarrel about that; with the right kind of signs and arrows we felt we could pull the cars off into the town. A month or two before Lucinda came back the City Council made them the offer. And there the matter was resting, the State and Federal people looking at the offer with their mouths poked out the way a station porter is taught to look at a tip. They didn’t like it but, as Lester said, they would have to take it because what else could they take?
Uncle Brownell wasn’t for giving them anything, and in his letter to the paper (which got shunted over against an ad for a new kind of truss) he cited the Panama Canal, the Polish Corridor, and other such historical easements through your territory for which you received a proper fee. He elaborated on it before the Chamber of Commerce of which he was a member—he “dabbled” in real estate, as he expressed it, carrying on the old firm of J. Brownell Baker, Real Estate & Insurance, his father—asking them, “Did the Republic of Panama furnish the right of way for the Canal?” and answering it himself with “For ten million dollars they did!” He was too clear-headed to advocate having our small police force attempt to defend our frontiers against invaders backed by State and Federal troops, but he would have opposed it with any means having a reasonable chance of success.
Not many others saw it against such a broad sweep of history as that; by this time most people were arguing that the payrolls involved in widening the street, resurfacing and all that, would siphon in more fresh money in a month than all the transient purchases that tightfisted Yankee motorists would make in a year. He saw himself as Horatio at the Bridge and they saw him as a wrench in the machinery of progress; it all depends on where you are standing.
I mention all this economic felicity of ours for the effect it had on Cousin Jason, a morose man of fifty or so with sad Spanish eyes that looked at your necktie out of their purple shadows like loungers in a Seville arcade. He didn’t live with us at The Homestead though he often stopped in nowadays to talk to Judge whom he retained professionally as counsel; a lonesome man, I used to think, seeing him almost any morning from Uncle Otis’ window a few minutes before the movies opened studying the hoardings outside, a brown felt level on his head, a brown overcoat (in season) turned inside out and draped over his left arm, then going up and buying a single ticket. He didn’t smoke or drink or, of course, gamble.
He was standing among his tables one evening talking to his manager. Business was good, had been good since the first paper mill, and other industries were on the way, and he had spent a lot of money modernizing the equipment, new brakes for the wheels, new electric magnets for the crap games, new cards that would have looked all right in a Widows’ Home. And it was a good night in a good year: the wheels were rumbling, the dice were hopping like trained fleas, layers of tobacco smoke hung against the freshly painted ceiling eddying toward the warm-air grills of the new air-conditioning system. A man in a dark suit stopped beside them with more purpose in his stance than the usual patron, a big man with authority in his shoulders that suggested the law but Jason couldn’t believe the law would just walk in like that without telling him; they were all nice boys, he knew them all. He didn’t know this man, and besides there was something un-local about him, hard to put your finger on, the way it is sometimes hard to tell a Georgian from a South Carolinian, but there. When the man spoke of course there was no longer any question of his being local; his consonants came rolling out like chunks of rock hitting the decks of a Great Lakes ore boat. “Where can I find Mr. Jason Colquitt?” he said.
“I’m Jason Colquitt,” Jason said and the man said, “Hello, Jason, I’m your new partner, where can we talk?”
And Jason was in the Big Time.
Or rather, the Big Time was in and Jason was out. Or all but. They offered him a nominal salary for hanging round, keeping things homelike, which after consulting Judge Fluther he decided to accept. He often went round after the movie and sat awhile in Bivins’ little shack at the used-car lot, not very welcome, particularly after becoming a salaried man, but apparently resigned to being unpopular. Sometimes he would study Bivins’ great blue-and-white sign (WE BUY WE SELL WE TRADE—Home of Nothing Down) for a quarter of an hour then lift his hand in a pale good-by and walk on without ever having said anything, on out under the arbor of strung light bulbs that with the help of a little night would turn the junkyard into a field of sparkling diamonds. He was a Presbyterian and I often used to see him at the Riverside Church, though he never saw me, or anyone else as far as I could tell, looking straight ahead and a little down with his droopy spaniel eyes and not speaking to anybody. He reminded me of old Mr. Sam Grimes, undertaker at the better funerals; when Mamie died and the procession was moving away from the house Mr. Grimes’ young men somehow overlooked him and left him standing there beside Papa Charles’ old hitching post with no way to get to the cemetery. He came up softly to Judge and me in Judge’s Chevrolet. “Would you mind—I am deeply—it is most regrettable—I don’t like to——” Judge said, “Get in, Sam. Move over, Clamp,” and Mr. Grimes slipped in and closed the door without a sound that usually gave off a thin “Pang!” “Some people don’t care to ride with the undertaker,” he said. Which Jason seemed to consider his general status also.
I was passing the theater one day early in the week and Jason almost ran me down, his irises slow to contract against the bright sunlight. He grunted, “Pardon,” detoured me and kept going. I supposed he didn’t recognize me but when I called after him and he dragged to a stop he didn’t seem surprised at who I turned out to be, just waited for me to state my business and get done. I had no business, nothing in particular, beyond a broad and perhaps half-morbid interest in family connections, together with, I dare say, a dim awareness of having added him and his affairs to my stock of subjects that might, in extremity, divert Lucinda from more intimate Homestead matters. I said, “Lucy’s looking well, Jason,” ending on an up-note, as we do, to indicate the merely gambit character of the remark, following him into an angle where the theater extended a few inches beyond Ray Gaines’ window of fancy spectacles (Jason was never a man for the exposed flank)—I had seen him and Lucy in the hall together one afternoon when he had left the Judge. He offered me a pinch of toothpicks from his coat pocket and we both took one in a sort of “Here’s how!” gesture. He said, “Lucy who?”
I said, “Cousin Lucinda Fannin,” and he said, “Jerry Fannin died and me holding an IOU for twenty-nine dollars and forty-five cents; I’ll never get it.” I told him Lucy might pay it, she had done well. He said, “Be a fool if she did,” and stood for a while until I said with the idea of drawing him out that I didn’t know what to think of Lucy’s giving up her book-writing job; it seemed all right but you just couldn’t ever be sure with those people. I said, “It’s like when you think you’ve tamed a woodcat and then he bites your thumb off.”
