Modern baptists, p.1
Modern Baptists, page 1
Praise for Modern Baptists and James Wilcox
“Wilcox is in every natural respect a writer of today, but he is also a precocious master of old-fashioned farce, and this novel is a wonderfully funny explosion of comedy that is solidly based, as a good comic novel must be, on a serious understanding of life.” —New Yorker
“Every reviewer, no doubt, has methods for marking choice passages in a book. Mine is a system of colored paper clips; yellow means funny. Modern Baptists should be thick with yellow paper clips on every page, but it does even better than that. While I was reading it, I laughed so hard I kept forgetting my paper clips. Wilcox has real comic genius. He is a writer to make us all feel hopeful.” —Anne Tyler, New York Times Book Review
“A raucous comedy of manners… a funny and serious account of middle-class life right next door.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune
“In Modern Baptists, North Gladiola, and Miss Undine’s Living Room, Wilcox has created a wonderfully antic fictional world—Dickensian in its wealth of eccentric characters: Waugh-like in its skewed, satiric flavor.” —New York Times
“Wilcox, Southerner Supreme, once again proves that we are funnier, wilder, and, oddly, more tragic than our Yankee cousins.” —Rita Mae Brown
“Yup, here we are again in the deep, dark South… in the company of absurd characters whose meager reaches exceed their minimal grasps. And we come to like them, of course… because dimness is made lovable by down homeness. Wilcox has enough wit to make us laugh and enough kindness to make us care…. The New South is an old mine for fiction; Wilcox proves there’s still some ore, still some lore, worth the digging.” —Los Angeles Times
“It’s not easy to write a really original novel; nearly everything has been tried before, and frequently. Yet Wilcox manages to do just that in his very funny book.” —Punch
“An alert, aggressively satiric novel, it blots all traces of regional moonlight from its horizons. Its ironies are blue-steel sharp, its characterizations can be wickedly penetrating.” —Houston Post
“Wilcox has made a tale that is realistic and fantastic, painfully comic, and, in a strange way, psychologically penetrating. Modern Baptists is an impressive achievement, and its author is a writer of impressive promise. There is no writer exactly like him. He is an original.” —Robert Penn Warren
“A beauty.” —Wallker Percy
VOICES OF THE SOUTH
ALSO BY JAMES WILCOX
North Gladiola
Miss Undine’s Living Room
Sort of Rich
Polite Sex
Guest of a Sinner
Plain and Normal
Heavenly Days
MODERN
BAPTISTS
A Novel
James Wilcox
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 1983 by James Wilcox
Originally published by The Dial Press, a division of Doubleday & Company Inc.
LSU Press edition published 2006 by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilcox, James.
Modern Baptists : a novel / James Wilcox.
p. cm. – (Voices of the South)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-3166-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Tula Springs (La. : Imaginary place)–Fiction. 2. Louisiana–Fiction.
I. Tide. II. Series.
PS3573.I396M6 2006
813’.54–dc22
2005027532
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
To Marie and James H. Wilcox
and
Maud Larson Swift
Modern Baptists
Part
ONE
“Remember how short my time is….”
—Psalm 89:47
CHAPTER
One
When F.X. got out of jail, he went to live with his half brother, Mr. Pickens, who lived right next door to Dr. Henry’s, the all-night store that sold beer and ice cubes and gas. The reason Mr. Pickens let him live there—it wasn’t that big a house, just one bedroom with a den, which was where F.X. slept—was because Mr. Pickens had a mole on his back that looked sort of like a fat New Jersey. At least that’s what the doctor said it looked like; he was trying to sound lighthearted so that Mr. Pickens wouldn’t feel too bad about the lab report, which said the mole was malignant. When Mr. Pickens heard this, he went numb all over. Forty-one years old and still a bachelor, be had no one to mourn him if he should pass away. So he visited F.X., who was just about to get out of Angola, the Louisiana state penitentiary, and told him he could stay with him at his house in Tula Springs until he got back on his feet again.
Mr. Pickens prepared a big meal to celebrate F.X.’s first nigbt in Tula Springs. It started with a clam dip and Doritos as an appetizer, then went on to mock turtle soup (canned—but Mr. Pickens didn’t tell his half brother it was canned, or mock), a tangerine salad with Green Goddess dressing, two huge chuck steaks with candied yams on the side, and finally, a pineapple upside-down cake. F.X. said he was too nervous to eat and only picked at his food. But after dinner he wrapped up some leftovers and took them into the den with him. He said they would come in handy around midnight, which was when he really got hungry.
Out of politeness Mr. Pickens stayed in the den with F.X. for a while and watched TV. It just didn’t seem right to leave him alone on his first night out. But it was hard to think of anything to say. He didn’t want to embarrass F.X. by bringing up anything that had to do with jail. And he didn’t think this was the appropriate time to tell him about the mole on his back—not on a night of celebration. Which was a shame, because Mr. Pickens was about to bust, he needed to tell someone so bad. (I don’t feel anything at all, he was dying to tell F.X. I mean, you’d think someone with one foot in the grave would feel a little pain. But it’s like I’m all bloated up with Novocain, my hands, my face….)
“Hey, what’s that?” F.X. mumbled, his dark-brown, almost black, eyes fixed on a candy dish atop the TV. Jail didn’t seem to have hurt his looks any; he was still as handsome as ever, except for some nose hairs that needed trimming.
“What? That over there?” Mr. Pickens said. “That’s some mints.”
“I thought I saw a roach. You got roaches, son?”
“No,” Mr. Pickens lied. “Care for a mint?”
“Goddamn friggin’ roach,” F.X. muttered while stretching out a bare foot to turn up the volume on the TV.
F.X. and Mr. Pickens had never been that close, except for a few years when they were children. After Mr. Pickens’s father got divorced, he moved away from Tula Springs—where young Mr. Pickens continued to live with his mother—and ran a drive-in theater in Ozone, the parish seat. There Mr. Pickens senior married again, this time an Italian woman who liked saints, which was why F.X. got stuck with a funny name, Francis Xavier. Bobby Pickens was allowed to visit his father on weekends, as long as he promised not to go to the new Mrs. Pickens’s Catholic church. F.X., his mother, and Mr. Pickens senior lived right underneath the Ozone Lux’s huge screen. Bobby used to think it was the most wonderful place in the world to live because you could stick your head out the living-room window and look up and see movie stars. The ticket booth was connected to the master bedroom, where F.X. and Bobby weren’t allowed to play. But they snuck in when their father was away and sold tickets to F.X.’s mother, who pretended to be a gangster. Bobby liked to think F.X. was a pretty good friend when they were young; then in high school F.X. became captain of the Ozone High football team and didn’t want to have anything to do with Bobby. Bobby, though treasurer of the Tula Springs High Safety Council and a member of the yearbook staff, had never lettered in a sport.
Halfway through a made-for-TV movie about a widow who learns to care for a broken-legged coyote that maimed her cat, the door chimes rang. “I’ll get it,” Mr. Pickens said, jumping out of the leatherette easy chair. F.X. gave him a funny look, sideways, so Mr. Pickens tried to act a little more natural as he left the room, shutting the door behind him.
Unable to imagine who would be calling on him at this hour, he was surprised to see when he opened the door that it was the girl who sold novelty items at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store, where he was the assistant manager. She said that she and her girl friend had been driving around, and they wondered if Mr. Pickens would maybe like to go get a Co’-Cola or something.
Normally Mr. Pickens wouldn’t have gone out for a drive with her. He suspected that she was more than a little in love with him, and he didn’t think it was fair to encourage her. Not that she was all that bad-looking. If she put on a little less eye shadow and stood up straight—and lost about twenty, twenty-five pounds—she’d be all right. No, it wasn’t her looks that bothered him. What he found lacking was that certain something that spelled class. He didn’t care how much a girl weighed or how many of her teeth needed fixing (that was another thing wrong with her)—if she had class, that was all that mattered.
Although he knew he should stay home with F.X., Mr. Pickens was glad for an excuse to get away from that coyote movie. After telling Burma, the Sonny Boy girl, to wait in the car while he got his coat, he went back into the den and asked F.X. if he minded much if he went out. He said he forgot but he had a date tonight. F.X. said no, he didn’t mind at all, and fo r the first time all evening his face brightened and he almost smiled. Before he left, Mr. Pickens demonstrated how to pull out the sofa bed and explained that the lavender sheets with the tulips on them used to be his mother’s, not his. “Yeah, right, got you,” F.X. said.
The car, an old Buick with a flame decal on its hood, puffed clouds of vapor from its twin exhausts into the crisp November air. Burma honked when he walked out onto the porch, a four-note honk: “My dog has fleas!” Bundled in his car coat with the imitation fur hood bristling on his head, Mr. Pickens signaled for her to stop flashing her headlights, which might alarm his neighbor, Mrs. Wedge. The four-note honk blared again as he stumbled into a clump of aspidistra in his front yard.
It wasn’t until he had opened the passenger door that he saw who Burma’s girl friend was: none other than the candy clerk at Sonny Boy, the girl whose watch he had stolen last Friday. Well, he couldn’t back out now.
“Scoot over,” Burma said to the candy clerk.
The candy clerk, a tall redhead who was something of a snob, said she’d get in the back seat. Burma told her not to be silly; they could all fit in front. Mr. Pickens thought it was a little strange that the two girls were friends, since Burma was thirty-six or thirty-seven—he wasn’t sure which—while Toinette, who was new at Sonny Boy, was only eighteen.
Toinette’s perfume was strong and made the upside-down cake in Mr. Pickens’s stomach start acting up. Burma backed out of the shell driveway in jerks, the noise of the mufflerless engine ricocheting like shotgun blasts off his sturdy cypress house. It wasn’t her car, she explained. It was her nephew’s. He was being punished for getting his belly button tattooed—not allowed to drive for another month. “I’m still not used to it,” she said, slowing down at Dr. Henry’s so a car could pull in. “Brakes are funny, you know. And this horn, tacky as sin. I mean my mama nearly died when I picked her up at the beauty college today.”
Toinette asked Burma if she hated the new operator at the beauty college, but before Burma could answer, Toinette said she needed some sugarless gum. She had left hers at home.
“Who was that man?” Burma asked, rummaging in her purse at a stoplight. “Mr. Pickens?”
“Oh,” he said. He had thought she was talking to the candy clerk. “What man?”
“The man in your house.” She handed Toinette a pack of gum. “One stick, now,” she admonished her.
“Oh, him,” he said. The blinds must have been open; they had seen into the den. Mr. Pickens made a mental note to keep them closed from now on. “Listen, where we going?” he asked, hoping to get her mind off the man. It wouldn’t look good if everybody at Sonny Boy found out he was living with an ex-con.
“I don’t know,” Burma said. “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Toinette said, rearranging her thin, freckled legs on the other side of the transmission hump.
Burma came to a full stop at the railroad tracks that ran parallel to Tula Springs’s main thoroughfare. The last time a train had come down these tracks was in 1908, when Tula Springs was an important logging town. But after most of the pine and cypress were chopped down, the lumber company pulled out, and the railroad became nothing but a dividing line between the side of town where Mr. Pickens lived and the side of town where Mrs. Wedge went every Tuesday to pick up her maid.
“Why do you always stop there?” the candy clerk demanded as they crossed the narrow-gauge tracks and turned onto Flat Avenue.
“It’s the law.”
“Law? Law’s for when there’s something there to mow you down. Besides, who’s going to arrest you, girl?” Toinette was right; Tula Springs didn’t even have a police force.
“I still got my conscience,” Burma insisted.
When they passed the Sonny Boy Bargain Store, which was dimly lit at night to discourage burglars, Burma honked.
“Don’t do that,” Toinette complained. “It depresses me.”
Next to Sonny Boy was a tin-roofed Laundromat, then three empty buildings, one of which—the old wooden hotel built by the lumber company—had a sign promising that it would soon be the home of Jojo’s Health Food Emporium (the sign had been promising that for the past two years). Ajax Feed and Seed, across the alley from the hotel, had all sorts of signs painted right on the cinder blocks in letters that dripped—Purina Chow, Cash & Carry, Mash Spaciel—and if you looked hard, you could see underneath a coat of whitewash, Suck Eggs. After Ajax was a Western Auto and a shoe store that never had the size you wanted. Then came Iota’s Poboys, a shack no bigger than a tollbooth on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Finally there was City Hall, the nicest building in Tula Springs. It dated back to the early nineteenth century, when the Florida Parishes, not part of the Louisiana Purchase, rebelled against Spanish rule. The settlers here, many of them Tories from Virginia and the Carolinas, ate corn, which the French, living just a few miles south, considered pig food. For a short while, in 1810, this strip of land south of Mississippi and north of Lake Pontchartrain pledged allegiance to no one, not to the U.S. or Spain or even England. Mr. Pickens was not very proud of this history—it smacked of Communism. Then, as if Tories and traitors weren’t bad enough, around the turn of the century the Illinois Central Railroad began colonizing these parishes with northerners, the shiftless kind that didn’t have sense enough to stay where they belonged. It was no wonder that even today there was a certain lack of patriotism in Tula Springs that bothered Mr. Pickens. The state had condemned City Hall, and for good reason: Although it was admittedly a handsome old building (after several fires it ended up being Greek Revival with twelve stately columns), it was downright dangerous. The Commissioner of Parks and Sewers’ high heel had poked right through a rotten step on the winding staircase, causing a nasty fall that made her forget who she was for a week. But the mayor, whose grandfather was born in Iowa, refused to budge from the condemned building, which made the whole town seem slightly illegal to Mr. Pickens.
“Let’s go to Junior’s,” Toinette said after they had driven a few minutes and were passing the Tula Springs Hatcheries just outside the city limits.
“Maybe I should be getting back home,” Mr. Pickens said after gazing absently at the long row of automated coops. At the edge of a pasture a scrawny, twisted tree leaned into the starless sky, which seemed dense enough to support it.
“Party pooper,” Toinette said.
“Don’t call Mr. Pickens a party pooper,” Burma said. “I know he really wants to have a Co’-Cola with us. Don’t you, Mr. Pickens?”
Mr. Pickens didn’t. “Well, just one,” he said.
CHAPTER
Two
Junior’s was off the highway at the end of an unpaved road that cut around a dried-up pond where they used to farm catfish. There was no sign on the plain, sagging building, no windows either, which was a shame, because the view would have been nice. Tula Creek broadened here, leaving behind the eroding banks of vine-tangled river birch to ripple past a beach of white sand and gravel.
After parking the car Burma took off her platform shoes and told the candy clerk she’d better do the same if she didn’t want her ankle twisted. But without waiting for Burma, Toinette marched right ahead, the sand crunching under her high heels like snow.
“She won’t listen,” Burma said, holding the screen door to the bar for Mr. Pickens while he knocked the sand out of his loafers.
At first they couldn’t see anything inside, even though there were colored lights dancing and twirling over the bar. But when their eyes adjusted to the dark, they spotted the candy clerk sitting in a booth by herself. She was already ordering a drink from the waitress.
Mr. Pickens sat on one side of the booth, while Burma slid in next to Toinette. Toinette told Burma she had a smudge under her eye, and Mr. Pickens began listening in on the conversation in the booth behind him. A woman was saying something about a metal guard she had ordered for Bertha, to keep her from pecking the pullets. It fastened right on her beak. The man with her said it wasn’t Bertha’s fault; Bertha probably wasn’t getting enough protein. “Feathers are all protein,” he said. The woman said something back, but Mr. Pickens didn’t catch it because the jukebox went on.
