Modern baptists, p.2
Modern Baptists, page 2
“Isn’t it?” Burma asked, laying a rough palm on his forearm.
“Isn’t what?” he asked, gently removing his arm.
“Isn’t it Mississippi on the other side of the river?”
The waitress arrived with three drinks and set them down. Mr. Pickens told her he hadn’t ordered anything yet, but Toinette told him to relax. She had ordered to save time.
“What is it?” he asked, testing the drink with a tiny sip.
“Tab cola,” Toinette replied.
“It doesn’t taste like Tab.”
“They might have put a little bourbon in it.”
“That’s Toinette’s drink,” Burma explained to Mr. Pickens. “Toinette won’t drink nothing but bourbon and Tab cola, will you, Toinette?”
Toinette nodded as she sipped the drink through a dainty straw. Her nostrils flared.
Burma asked again if it was Mississippi on the other side of the river, and Mr. Pickens said no, the state line was about a mile upstream.
“That will be one dollar, miss,” Toinette said, holding out her hand to Burma. “I told you it wasn’t.”
Now that he found out Toinette was winning a bet, Mr. Pickens wished he hadn’t told the truth about Mississippi. He’d much rather have seen Burma win. The way Toinette always looked at him, like she was the queen of England, made him wonder if she realized that at any moment, just like that (he mentally snapped his fingers), he could have her fired. It would be easy as pie.
“What time is it?” Toinette asked.
“What do you have to know the time for?” Burma asked. “We just got here.”
Toinette looked down at her bony wrist, where her watch used to be. Mr. Pickens’s round, boyish face turned red, but with all the colored lights flashing he just ended up looking a little more purple.
“I always like to know what time it is,” Toinette said.
Mr. Pickens took a few gulps from his drink. He really wished he hadn’t stolen Toinette’s watch last Friday. It had started out as a practical joke—an icebreaker, really. He had been thinking of ways to get to know the candy clerk better, and then on Friday he noticed that for some reason she had left her watch next to the pecan Turtles. It was the perfect opportunity. While she had her back turned, weighing out some Candy Corn, he nonchalantly walked by and palmed the watch. The point was to get her nervous and excited, then produce it suddenly and make her laugh at herself for getting upset over nothing. The technique had worked once before for Mr. Pickens, not at Sonny Boy but over at the mall in Mississippi when he was working as a shoe clerk. The shoe clerk he had stolen a bracelet from hit him with her fist when he gave her back the “stolen” jewelry. Of course it didn’t hurt, and she decided he was more interesting than he looked and let him take her to the movies. Mr. Pickens had no intention of ever dating Toinette (she was both too young and too tall), but he did want her to know that he wasn’t a stuffed shirt like some people thought. Unfortunately the scheme failed. When the candy clerk saw her watch was gone, she tore like fire to the back of the store, where the manager and Mr. Pickens shared an office. Mr. Pickens tried to catch up with her, but by the time he got to the office, she had already told Mr. Randy, the manager, who then called in the security guard. Mr. Pickens couldn’t explain now. He could only wait for a chance to sneak the watch into Toinette’s purse, and hope she would think she had put it in there by mistake.
“Look, Mr. Pickens finished off his Tab,” Burma said. She waved at the waitress, then made a circular motion with her hand over the table.
“I don’t care for another,” Mr. Pickens said.
“See, I told you he was a party pooper,” Toinette said. Then she told Burma to move so she could go freshen up.
Burma and Mr. Pickens were left alone for a few minutes while Toinette went over to the bar and started talking to Junior. Mr. Pickens kept on glancing over his shoulder at her. If a person said she was going to freshen up, then she ought to go freshen up, not stand around talking forever. Junior, a fat old man who claimed he never ate anything in his entire life but hamburgers, even when he was a baby, caught Mr. Pickens’s eye. Mr. Pickens looked back at Burma.
“Don’t be mad at Toinette,” Burma said, snapping the rubber band on her wrist.
“I’m not mad at her.”
“You look mad. And why don’t you take off that thing? Here.” She leaned over the table and began to unzip his car coat. He removed her hand and began unzipping himself.
“Oh, let me see,” she said.
“What?”
She reached for his left hand and examined the amethyst in his class ring. “Bless your heart, St. Jude. I didn’t know you went there,” she said, releasing the hand. An hour from Tula Springs, St Jude State College’s small, idyllic campus looked right out on Lake Pontchartrain. Everyone from Tula Springs High went there, except for a few brains who went to L.S.U. “When did you graduate?” she asked.
“I was in the class of 1963,” he said, avoiding a lie. He did not feel like telling her he hadn’t graduated but had dropped out in his junior year because he hated living in a dorm. Everyone was always snapping rattails at you in the shower.
“Then you must have been there when I was there. I’m ’66, that’s when I graduated, 1966.”
“Really,” he said, trying to mask his surprise.
“Got a B.A. in sociology. My teacher wanted me to go on and get my master’s. I said fine, I will, but I’m not going to do any paper longer than five pages. I just hate papers; they make me want to quit living. So my teacher says to me,‘No, ma’am, you got to do long papers just like everyone else,’ and I say, ‘Suit yourself, been nice knowing you.’ What did you major in, Mr. Pickens?”
“Agricultural sciences.”
“You mean, you wanted to be a farmer?”
Mr. Pickens had never wanted to be a farmer. He had enrolled in the Department of Agriculture, though, because at the time he was mad at his father. His father thought that becoming a farmer was about the worst thing that could happen to someone. Growing up, Mr. Pickens was always being told to stop talking like a farmer, stop dragging his feet like a farmer, stop thinking like a fanner. So when Mr. Pickens went off to school, he got his revenge. The only problem was that being an aggie major was harder than he expected, and he wished he could be something easy, like an English major.
“I was more into the technical side of agribusiness,” Mr. Pickens said in reply to Burma’s question.
Burma sat there a moment, a blank look on her face. While Mr. Pickens tried to think of something else to say, Toinette returned to the table and, after groaning loudly, said she wished she didn’t have to go to work tomorrow. Her feet were killing her. “They ought to make it where you can sit while you work,” she went on. “I don’t see any reason why we got to stand all the time.”
“That’s what I like about Mr. Pickens,” Burma said. “He never reports me when I sit down.”
“Well, he better not report me,” Toinette said, looking right at him, “ ’cause I plan to do some sitting tomorrow.”
“Now, listen, girls,” Mr. Pickens said as a long strand of blond hair drooped down his nose; he shoved it back up on his balding pate. “I got to treat y’all like everyone else at work and…”
They lost interest in what he was saying, though, and began talking about Mr. Randy’s lime-green pants, how much they hated them. Toinette’s flat, almost Oriental face was wrinkled in disgust. It was strange, he thought, how she could look beautiful one minute, ugly the next, depending on the angle.
“Who was that man at your house?” Toinette asked after the waitress brought them the check. Even though Mr. Pickens insisted on paying, Burma made him put his VISA card away. She said she and Toinette were treating. And besides, they didn’t take VISA at Junior’s, only cash.
“Who was that man?” Toinette persisted when they had finished figuring the tip.
“You already asked him that,” Burma snapped. “And I done asked him once myself.” She dabbed at her lips with a tube of white lipstick. “He would’ve told us if it was any of our business.”
“So what’s the big secret?” Toinette asked, patting a failed frizzy redhead version of the elaborate Farrah Fawcett hairdo.
“I don’t like that chocolate-colored shirt Mr. Randy wears,” Mr. Pickens said, trying to veer the conversation back onto a safer topic.
“Is he a friend?”
“We don’t really socialize much, Mr. Randy and me.”
“No—the man in your house.”
Mr. Pickens had to say something; they were getting too suspicious. “He’s my uncle. Just visiting.”
“Uncle? He’s mighty cute for an uncle.”
“Toinette, quit bothering Mr. Pickens.”
“I’m not bothering him. I just think it’s strange that an uncle looks younger than his nephew.”
Mr. Pickens didn’t realize she had got such a good look at F.X. She must have eyes like a hawk. “Well,” he offered lamely, “there’s been a lot of divorce and all in my family.”
“‘And all’ is right,” Toinette said.
“Okay, girl, you asked for it.” Burma slipped the rubber band off her wrist and shot it toward the bar. “Toinette spied on you, Mr. Pickens. When you went back inside the house for your coat, she—”
“Hush,” Toinette said.
“She ran up to the bushes under your window and peeped in. I told her it was wrong, but she—Ouch!” Burma slapped Toinette, who had pinched her on the arm.
“Oh,” Mr. Pickens said. He really didn’t care that much anymore. So let them find out he was living with an ex-con. Did it really matter? After all, he was going into the hospital next week, and there was a good chance he might not come out alive. How could he have been dumb enough to forget this? Yet he had—for a while, at least, sitting there listening to them talk about lime-green pants and aching feet.
“Why didn’t you tell your uncle to come?” Toinette said as they all stood up to leave. “We could’ve been four, then. Burma, don’t wave at Junior. You know he likes you.”
“He does not,” Burma said, waving.
“Junior’s got a crush on Burma,” Toinette whispered to Mr. Pickens as they stepped outside. The fresh air, laden with the rich smell of soil from the river, made him feel less woozy.
“What did she say?” Burma asked Mr. Pickens.
“I told him the truth,” Toinette said and then dodged as Burma’s handbag grazed her shoulder. Laughing, Burma took aim at her girl friend again and hit Mr. Pickens on the mouth with the bag’s metal clasp. It stung, but it wasn’t worth mentioning.
“Tell her to stop hitting me,” Toinette said, holding on to Mr. Pickens’s arm and using him as a shield.
“Now, girls,” he cautioned.
The moon, rising over the river birch, seemed to tug at Mr. Pickens’s heart. He was a shield for a little while longer, then herded the girls into the car. It was time to go home.
CHAPTER
Three
Mr. Pickens knocked softly on the door to the den before poking his head inside. “Can I come in?” he asked, then winced as Burma’s four-note honk blared from the driveway; the girls were driving away. F.X. was propped up on the pull-out sofa, gnawing on a steak bone while the TV played. It was a deluxe model with a carved blond cabinet, and F.X. had moved it from its accustomed place next to the radiator so that it would be closer to the bed. Mr. Pickens noticed a big dent in the shag rug where the TV was supposed to be.
“Everything okay?” Mr. Pickens asked.
“I can’t get the remote control to work,” he said, holding up the brown box. F.X. had a very distinctive way of talking. Instead of his lips, which barely seemed to move, it was his eyebrows that did most of the work, raising or lowering, separately or together. It was a little disconcerting.
“Remote doesn’t work with cable.”
“So Tula Springs has got cable.” F.X. wrapped the bone in tinfoil and set it aside. In his white boxer shorts he looked like he had just got back from a week at Biloxi. But it was his olive skin, not the sun, that made him look so tan. And he was fit too, astonishingly fit. As Mr. Pickens went to the window and pulled down the Venetian blinds, he tried to suck in his paunch.
“We just got it,” he said, wrapping the cord around a window crank. “We get Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta, Alexandria.” The shadow of his round head rose up on the dark knotty-pine wall; he switched off the Danish modern lamp, and the shadow vanished.
“I saw myself,” F.X. said. In the flickering light of the TV he seemed to hover over the lavender sheets, barely touching them. “Remember that commercial I did in Baton Rouge a few years ago? You know, the car wax thing where I’m kissing the hood? Yeah, well, it was on tonight.”
F.X. used to get some television work, as well as a few assignments modeling clothes for Maison Blanche catalogs. But his real aim in life was to be a celebrity—preferably a film star. For the past twenty years he had been drifting back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, returning to Louisiana whenever he was hard up for cash. The last job he had, before being sent off to prison, was in a revival of Come Blow Your Horn at a dinner theater near Ozone. Although he had a starring role, they made him sing a song in between the acts pushing the house drink, Cajun Catnip. It was a choice between singing the song, which he hated, and waiting on tables—so he sang. All this had come out at the trial two years ago, which was how Mr. Pickens knew about it. Genierally F.X. was vague about his career.
“No residuals,” F.X. said after his brother asked him whether he shouldni’t get paid for the car wax rerun. “I got a flat fee, a hundred bucks.”
“You never did have a good head for business,” Mr. Pickens commented, and instantly regretted it. He was afraid F.X. might take this as an allusion to his arrest: F.X. had been caught selling cocaine at the dinner theater to the special guest star from London. “I mean I’ve always thought of you as the artistic type.”
An eyebrow was raised.
Mr. Pickens coughed, then picked out a mint from the candy dish.
“Say, Bobby, you ever hear from that fuck?”
“Who?”
“The old goat.”
“Oh.” Considering a moment, he said, “Dad’s fine.” Of course their father was not fine. Shortly after F.X.’s trial Mr. Pickens senior had declared he couldn’t stand one more minute of Louisiana. So he sold the drive-in, and in lieu of going to the moon—which was the only place he could think of that wouldn’t have any trees or grass or swamps or anything else that reminded him of his native state—he and his wife resettled in Tucson. There his wife, F.X.’s mother, was accidentally run over in a Burger King parking lot. Mr. Pickens junior wanted to go out for the funeral—after all, F.X.’s mother had always been kind to him; and also he would have liked to see what the West looked like in real life—but his father forbade him to come. He said he never wanted to set eyes on Bobby again until he got married.
“Just fine,” Mr. Pickens repeated.
“You know what that bastard did? Waited till a week after the funeral. Then he tells me about her. I get a postcard at Angola, he sends me a fucking postcard.”
“F.X., he’s old. You can’t…”
“‘Your mother’s dead,’ he says. ‘Hope you’re satisfied.’ That’s how I find out about it. ‘Hope you’re satisfied.’ I like that.”
“He’s old.”
“He’s old, he’s old,” F.X. said wearily. “I’m old, you’re old, we’re all old. That doesn’t give anyone the right to say things like that.”
“No, but…”
“Cool it, son. I don’t want to talk about it”
Sliced by the half-closed Venetian blinds, a car light rippled over the foot of the bed as someone pulled into Dr. Henry’s next door. Mr. Pickens went to the window and closed the blinds tight. A car door slammed; voices. It sounded as if they were standing right under the window. “He’s weird, man,” one teenager kept repeating while another talked non-stop. “And then, oh, yeah, right, then he says to me, I ain’t doing none of your fucking homework for you, and I say, wow, you got to be kidding, I never said…”
“Yeah, we’re all old,” F.X. said over the voices. He sounded calmer now. “You realize, son, that in ten months and twenty-four days I’ll be forty?”
Mr. Pickens sat tentatively on the window seat.
“Scares the living shit out of me,” F.X. went on while staring at the TV, which was still on, the volume low. “I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat thinking about it. Forty and a nobody. Hell, I’d rather be dead.”
“Well, now, listen, it’s not really so—”
“At Angola I once woke up screaming, thinking it had already happened. Buster, my cell mate, he had to splash cold water on my face. Yes, sir, I’d rather be dead, dead as a doornail. ’Cause there’s no way I’m going to be a nothing, not a forty-year-old nothing.”
“Don’t you think you’re…”
His eyes still fixed on the set, he said softly, as if to him-self, “Been counting the days, boy. Ten months, twenty-four days…”
“Twenty-three,” Mr. Pickens corrected. It was five minutes after midnight
“What?” F.X. said, looking annoyed. He punched his pillow and got under the blanket.
“You know, F.X., I think about things too. Serious things, I mean.”
F.X. reached out a smooth bare arm and switched off the set. He yawned loudly.
“People don’t really like to talk about serious things,” Mr. Pickens said, leaning back in the window seat “Like no one ever asks me about my mother anymore.” Mr. Pickens’s mother was in a nursing home, over in the next parish. F.X. knew this but never once asked after her health. The bed-springs creaked as F.X. changed positions.
“Things like death and all,” Mr. Pickens said to the darkened room. He wanted to yell out the window to shut those damn kids up; it was hard to think with all that yakking going on. But kids nowadays had a real mean streak in them. There was no telling what they might do if you stirred them up. “People get antsy if you start talking about it It’s a shame, because I think about it a lot. I’m always wondering what it’s going to be like afterwards.” He scratched a rash on his arm; the doctor thought it was an allergy to something, but he wasn’t sure what. “It’s funny, but the whole idea of heaven scares me just as much as hell. I guess the thought of living forever, me up there forever—even if it doesn’t hurt, even if it feels good and I’m happy all the time—still, it’s just too much. Then I think, okay, so maybe when you’re dead, you’re dead, and there’s no more you. I try that one out, and Lord, F.X., that one scares me just as much. I mean, what if it’s true what some people say, that there’s not going to be any Last Judgment? Doesn’t that seem just about as awful as if there was going to be one? Think of people like Hitler and Nero and Castro, all of them getting off scot-free.”
