Taming the divine heron, p.5
Modern Baptists, page 5
While Mr. Pickens sat there, mute, his rash itching fiercely, Mrs. Quaid sucked the Camel down until it almost burned her fingers. Then, stubbing it out, she said she better run. She had to get to the shoe repair shop before it closed.
“You tell that F.X. he better not hurt my baby,” she said at the door, then left.
CHAPTER
Seven
“You’ll be boiled, you’ll be strangled, you’ll be boiled, and I shall skin you, I’ll skin you, I’ll skin you, I’ll behead, then I’ll hang you to a pole, I then will pin you, you’ll be boiled, you’ll be strangled, you’ll be boiled, and I shall skin you.” Decked out in baggy gold pants, pointed shoes, and a paisley turban, the bass finished his aria on a triumphant note and strode offstage to polite, scattered applause, which awakened Mr. Pickens. The opera was being performed at Black Angus Coliseum, the large, domed wooden hall where St. Jude State College hosted livestock exhibitions, rodeos, and graduation exercises for local high schools. Normally St. Jude’s music department held its concerts in the student union, but the light board in the student-union auditorium had caught fire the previous week, so they were forced to move the whole production to the coliseum.
Mr. Pickens had come by himself. He wore his best blue-checked suit with the reversible silk vest, and a brand-new tie that he had bought at Fraternity Row, the most expensive men’s shop in the mall over in Mississippi. When the lights came up at intermission, he stood up gratefully from the hard metal folding chair and looked about him at the other members of the opening night audience. Beside him was a lady in a mink stole, the kind that had the heads left on it. As Mr. Pickens brushed against the fur to get by her, his eyes met the eyes of a mink—small, black, vicious beads that glared at him in outrage.
A week had passed since Mrs. Quaid’s visit, and a strange, depressing week it had been. With no warning the weather had changed, turning the crisp November air into a rank soup that smelled of hearty weeds, yellowing lawns, and mutts on the loose. F.X. used the air-conditioner at night to drown out the tree frogs in the chinaberry, as well as the teenagers, who, now that it was warm, congregated in greater numbers at Dr. Henry’s. Work for Mr. Pickens had never been so unpleasant. He could barely stand to look at Mr. Randy after what Mrs. Quaid had told him, and at the same time he found himself staring at Toinette more than was necessary. He was afraid of her—at least that’s what he thought at first. F.X. still wouldn’t say a word about what had happened on their date. In fact he never talked about her at all, even though Mr. Pickens suspected that he was still seeing her on the sly. Mr. Pickens worried constantly that Toinette was going to accuse him in public about the watch, and his heart beat fast and erratically whenever he had to talk to her. When he finally summoned up the courage to tell her about being docked because of the stool, though, Toinette looked more sad than angry, which wasn’t like her at all. Mr. Pickens went home that evening feeling more disturbed than ever. But it wasn’t until he had changed into his yard clothes and was pulling up alligator grass near the ditch in the backyard that the truth finally dawned on him: He was falling in love with Toinette.
Unlike most men, Mr. Pickens did not fall in love easily and often. In fact it was safe to say that until now he had never truly been in love with anyone. Why this was so, he didn’t know. It worried him a great deal until he finally decided that most people were like him: they only said they were in love, when at best they simply had a big crush, which, as always, would soon wear off. But now something told him that at forty-one he was about to experience the real thing. It was a frightening thought. Deep inside he knew there would be only one woman in his life, one or none at all. Why, then, did this woman have to be someone like Toinette? He couldn’t imagine a worse choice, not in a million years. She was way too young, three or four inches too tall, and what’s more, he didn’t really like her that much.
Astir with a muddled, half-formed love for Toinette that was growing stronger by the minute, Mr. Pickens resolved to transfer this feeling—before it was too late—to real wife material, a mature woman who was sober, industrious, intelligent, and if not beautiful, at least well groomed. That was the reason he began going out in the evenings to places he didn’t want to go to—a party at his mother’s old friend Mrs. Bingham’s, where the youngest woman turned out to be fifty; a lecture at L.S.U. entitled “The Decline of the Nutria Industry in Louisiana” (Mrs. Bingham’s great-niece gave the lecture, but Mrs. Bingham had forgotten that this great-niece was happily married, a fact Mr. Pickens discovered after sitting through the entire lecture and a long question-and-answer period afterward); and now an opera, which was pure torture. Though bored out of his mind, he was mature enough to realize that great music such as this was supposed to have a good effect on you, whether you liked it or not; so he endured it.
Mr. Pickens walked toward the west exit of the coliseum, where a concession stand was selling soft drinks and cotton candy. While standing in line he finally saw someone he recognized—his dentist from Tula Springs. Not many people from Tula Springs went to cultural events at St. Jude—except for old Mrs. Jenks, who reviewed them for the Tula Springs Herald, concentrating mainly on what people wore. Mr. Pickens smiled and nodded at the dentist, but he must not have seen him, because he looked away and started talking to his wife.
After buying a Dr Pepper, Mr. Pickens went and stood near the dentist Perhaps he just didn’t recognize him, Mr. Pickens thought when the dentist turned his back on him; after all, it had been a year since he had had his teeth cleaned. He worked on an opening gambit, something like, Hi, I guess with my mouth closed you don’t recognize me. While he refined this remark the dentist and his wife were joined by a nice-looking young couple whom the wife introduced to the dentist as Jerry and Jill. Jerry and Jill, Mr. Pickens overheard, had driven from New Orleans that night because Jill’s brother was one of the janissaries in the opera. Jill said the causeway was slippery tonight and someone had skidded right in front of them. Mr. Pickens caught Jill’s eye, and she smiled at him. He opened his mouth to say that he had once skidded on the causeway, but then Jerry said in a loud voice that he was enjoying the opera, but he wished it wasn’t so stuffy and hot
Mr. Pickens steeled himself. It was now or never. This would be his last chance to meet a young couple like Jerry and Jill, people who probably knew a whole batch of nice, attractive single women. “Hi,” Mr. Pickens said to Jill, who smiled encouragingly at him, “I guess with my mouth closed you don’t recognize me.”
Jill opened her eyes a little wider; her husband put an arm around her, frowned at Mr. Pickens, and told his wife he wanted a soda. The dentist and his wife followed Jerry and Jill to the concession stand. Appalled at his stupidity, Mr. Pickens held up his mimeographed program and pretended to read it: Belmonte… Curtis C. May haw, IV… Wolfgang Amadeus… Act I—A garden in front of Pasha Selim’s palace… Costanze…
“Mr. Pickens!”
A familiar voice, a tug at his sleeve. He looked up and saw Burma. Her hair piled high on her head, she was wearing a complicated dress that looked something like a crinoline trimmed with lace. “Mr. Pickens, what are you doing here!” she cried, her eyes bright with excitement.
“Just looking at the opera,” he replied more temperately; her enthusiasm was not infectious.
“I didn’t know you liked music!” She squeezed his arm; then, looking over her shoulder, she caught sight of a young man standing a few feet away. “Hey, where did you go to?” she said, beckoning to him. The young man approached. He was dark, darker than F.X. even, and had a scar over his right eye that made his face look unbalanced. Burma told him to shake hands with Mr. Pickens.
“This is my fiance,” she said as they shook hands. “Emmet Orney. Emmet, this is Mr. Pickens, the man I’m always telling you about.”
Emmet blushed and looked down at the sawdust on the floor. “Hey,” he muttered, then pulled out a wad of tissues from his trousers and blew his nose, or tried to; it was a very dry sound.
“I been hoping you two could meet someday and be friends,” Burma said, brushing some lint off Emmet’s madras jacket. “Emmet’s just got out of the Army. He’s at St. Jude now, plays the flute.”
“Clarinet,” Emmet said softly.
“I mean clarinet.” Burma looked hopefully at her boss, but Mr. Pickens didn’t say anything. “Do you like clarinets?”
Mr. Pickens said he did.
“Maybe one night you can come over and Emmet will play for you. I don’t know why I said flute,” she backtracked. “You must think I’m a real ninny.”
Mr. Pickens denied this. He noticed the dentist was looking at him, so he repositioned himself behind Burma.
“Are you here by yourself, Mr. Pickens? If you are, why don’t you come sit over by us? There’s an extra space.”
Mr. Pickens smiled obscurely.
“I hope you’re planning on coming to our wedding next month,” she went on. “Toinette’s helping me plan it. We’re having a music theme for it. There’s going to be notes on the cake and candy clarinets and—”
“No clarinets,” Emmet said softly through clenched teeth. Burma slapped his shoulder. “Hush, Emmet, I already told you we was having clarinets. You can’t go changing your mind now.” She smiled at Mr. Pickens. “Oh, and then we got one of Emmet’s friends to play the piano, plus I’m checking up on some ice to see if we can get it carved to look like a note. What do you call those black notes, Emmet?”
“Quarter notes,” he said, gazing at the steel rafters in the dome.
“That’s right, a big ice quarter note.”
Mr. Pickens managed to slip away from Burma and Emmet before they all sat down again. The dentist and his wife returned to their seats followed by old Mrs. Jenks, who had a corsage pinned to her ample bosom.
At the next intermission Burma made Emmet stand up on his chair and look over the sea of heads for Mr. Pickens. Glancing nervously over his shoulder, Mr. Pickens hurried toward the east exit and the parking lot. He would have liked to see the last act of the opera—not because he was enjoying the singing but because he thought if you were going to absorb culture, it didn’t count unless you absorbed the whole thing.
The coliseum was right across the street from Lake Pontchartrain. As he drove past the oaks and palms lining the shore he was conscious of the red light of an oil derrick far out in the dark, calm waters. No matter how fast he went, the light was always there, steady and unblinking, as if he were not really moving at all, as if the breeze created by the car were a real breeze, touching not just him through the opened window but everything in its path. Yet there were no white-caps, and the palm fronds did not stir.
To get to Tula Springs he passed through Ozone with its gracious lakefront houses. There used to be a ferry here, allowing people to escape from the New Orleans heat in the summer; but when the causeway was built at Mandeville, the ferry was discontinued, and many of Ozone’s houses were neglected and fell into disrepair. Ozone was now a resort town without vacationers, its beaches largely unused, the drive-in, which once did a thriving business, silent. He slowed down at the weather-beaten, sagging screen of the Ozone Lux, which faced the lake. Here he turned north, away from the lake, onto an elevated interstate that cut a straight line through a wilderness of swamp and half-dead cypress, a spillway for the Mississippi. A half hour later the landscape changed abruptly. He was in the piney woods, climbing gradually, imperceptibly away from the rich bottomland to the harsher, meager soil of Tula Springs.
CHAPTER
Eight
At Sonny Boy the next day Burma tried to give a refund to an old woman who returned a defective Secret Agent pen. The old woman had written a long letter in invisible ink to her grandson, but she said when the grandson got it and held it over a flame, no writing appeared on the paper, not a word. Mr. Randy happened to be standing in the next aisle and overheard the complaint. After Burma had promised the old woman a refund and was on her way to the cash register, Mr. Randy came over and told the old woman there were no refunds. The old woman demanded a sheet of paper, and Burma obliged by ripping one from a note pad. Then the old woman wrote something on the ruled paper and handed it to Mr. Randy. “Read that for me, Mr. Gen. Man.,” she said, peering through her bifocals at his ID badge.
Mr. Randy screwed up his eyes and held the paper close to his stubby nose. “You got to hold it over a flame,” he said.
“I’ll get a candle,” Burma volunteered.
“A broken candle,” Mr. Randy said. A real cheapskate, he kept a special drawer in which his clerks deposited defective merchandise such as chipped statuettes, stationery that was water-stained, and broken candles. Burma, though, did not go to this drawer. Instead, when Mr. Randy’s back was turned, she snitched the best candle she could find from the display bin, unwrapped it, then broke it in half. After she gave this to Mr. Randy, he ordered her to go help Toinette at the candy counter.
Burma obeyed, but she was peeved at him for not giving the poor old woman her money back. She told Toinette about the incident, and both of them started moving real slow at the candy counter, taking forever to weigh the peanuts and kisses and then making change like it was their first day on the job. Mr. Randy ordered Mr. Pickens to go straighten the girls out, so Mr. Pickens had to go over to the candy counter and warn them. That was when Burma told him the whole story of the Secret Agent pen. Mr. Pickens sympathized with her and said it wasn’t fair of Mr. Randy. Burma said if he thought that, why didn’t he go over and say something to Mr. Randy. She was a little grouchy today because she hadn’t got to say goodbye to Mr. Pickens at the opera last night.
“Don’t blame Mr. Pickens,” Toinette said. “It’s not his fault.”
Mr. Pickens tried not to feel too good when he heard this, but when he looked in her eyes, he couldn’t help it. Those green eyes, which had always seemed so cold to him, were warm enough now to melt Burma’s quarter note. Burma turned her back on them and sniffed loudly.
“Burma, you owe Sonny Boy thirty-nine cents plus tax,” Mr. Randy said, looming up on them from out of nowhere. Mr. Pickens sidled over to the next counter and, from a ring on his belt, chose a key that opened the glass case where wallets were displayed. He rearranged some of the wallets while listening in on Mr. Randy.
“Thirty-nine cents for what?” Burma demanded.
“This here Lucky Eagle number nine-nine-oh note pad you ripped up.”
“Can I write you a check?”
“I’ll deduct it Friday. And you girls stop snitching cashews,” he added as he walked back toward his office.
That evening Mr. Pickens went to work in his backyard again, trying to make the area around the ditch look neater. After clearing away the alligator grass and the disreputable-looking sumac, he planned to sod the area over with St. Augustine, which his mother’s friend Mrs. Bingham promised to give him. F.X. toted the alligator grass and some trash from the ditch—beer bottles, candy wrappers, a doll leg—to the front in a wheelbarrow, then returned and began peeling an orange-and-purple fungus from the trunk of the Chinese tallow tree.
“Don’t do that,” Mr. Pickens said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his dirty garden gloves. “You might hurt the tree.”
F.X. tossed the pulpy fungus into the ditch and sat down. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked good-naturedly.
“Nothing.” Mr. Pickens yanked up the roots of a scrubby sumac. “Nothing,‘cept I’m tired, tired to death, F.X.”
“Take a nap.”
“Not that kind of tired. I’m talking about mentally tired. Sonny Boy is getting me down. All day long it’s bicker, bicker, bicker. I don’t know if I can take it much longer. As a matter of fact, I’ve a good mind to quit.”
F.X. tugged at some milkweed. “Don’t quit yet, son.”
“Why not?”
“I was counting on you. Remember, you said you’d loan me a few bucks for a set of weights.”
“F.X.”
“So what are you going to do if you quit? Jobs aren’t so easy to come by these days.”
“I’ll find something. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to put out some feelers. Then, soon as I get a good job, I’m going to tell Zell P. Randy what he can do with his stupid Sonny Boy.”
A dragonfly alighted on a rainbow of oil in the ditch water. When F.X. tried to bomb the insect with a stone, water splashed on his brother.
“Thanks, F.X.”
F.X. smothered a laugh. “Sorry.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, man, what’s eating you? It’s just a little water.”
Mr. Pickens yanked at a clump of grass. “Sonny Boy isn’t the only thing I’m tired of.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not made out of money, F.X. Did you ever stop to think about that?”
“Who bought the hamburgers last night?”
“Great. You buy one dinner. I mean, what do you think this is, some sort of resort? You’re practically forty, yet all you do all day is nothing—nothing but sneak around with teenagers.”
“Teenagers?”
“You know who I mean. That girl.”
F.X. looked puzzled. “What girl? Oh, not Tonie Whatchamadig?”
Mr. Pickens could see why his brother was not a success; he was a terrible actor. “Yeah, Toinette. I know you’ve been seeing her.”
“You got to be kidding.” F.X. tugged on the Chinese tallow, a frail sapling. “I can do better than that. Besides, she’s just a kid.”
