Jolly Read online

  “Funny.”

  “Numbers four and five; I told you already she’s a pig, and he’s about the biggest horse’s ass ever walked. A regular animal farm I got on my hands. Number six; yes, I can open a window to let out the smoke, only make up your mind had you rather freeze to death or suffocate.”

  They drove along Whiskey Row in silence, both intent on seeing into as many bars as possible in an attempt to fathom the juke-lighted dimness that held unaccountable the mysteries of whiskey and pick-up girls and back-room gaming. Most of the places seemed empty, but from Friday night to Sunday night—or rather early Monday morning—they would seep their happy life, their smells, their guitar music, their destruction out onto Montezuma Street like sweat from giant pores. One loose-hipped woman clattered down the Row swinging her purse to some secret inside her home-parlored head, the iridescence of her skirt changing to match each flash of neon she passed. Luke slowed the car.

  “Jeez,” he said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Luke,” said Jolly.

  “Well, you never know. You gotta keep on the lookout.”

  “Yeh, you told me. Home.”

  Luke reluctantly shifted gears and turned the corner and nosed the car toward Jolly’s side of town. “Rosy’s got business tonight.” Luke pointed toward a two-storied brick building, the bottom floor of which housed a colored tavern, the top floor (reached by a single steep flight of stairs behind a green door) of which housed Rosy and whatever charms she directed. “You got three dollars?”

  “No, and neither do you and if you did you wouldn’t have the nerve to spend it up there. Me neither.”

  Luke kept the motor running in front of Jolly’s house. “See you tomorrow,” he said, “and no kiddin’, Joll, take it easy with Gusperson. Some day he’s gonna chew you up.”

  “Will he eat me whole?”

  Luke grinned. “Naw. He’ll spit that part out.”

  Jolly stopped between the pines edging the path and viewed the little shingled house folded in among the trellised dead vines like an old barn owl impassively scanning the moonlight for prey, its glass eyes dimly reflecting the night. He walked to the back door and cautiously entered the kitchen as he always did, although knowing well his mother would be lying awake waiting for sound of him. He groped above his head for the string and pulled. Unshaded light sprang against the four walls as if it were desperate to escape the confinements of a room too small for a hundred watts.

  “Is that you, Jolly?”

  “Yes, Mom. It’s me.”

  “What time is it?”

  He knew she had already picked up, shook, and viewed her phosphorescent-faced clock. “It’s late,” he answered.

  “Hum.”

  From her tight-lipped response Jolly knew she would have a word or two to say at breakfast in the morning, and she would roust him out of bed at least an hour early without having started the fire. Well, he could use the hour to study for the Great Hoary Father.

  He rummaged in the refrigerator through habit more than hunger. He set out one of the quarts of milk and reached down a glass from an open shelf.

  “They’s cake,” called his mother from her bed.

  He smiled and rattled the cake cover so it would be known he appreciated the clue.

  After he had placed the glass and plate in the sink, he entered the bathroom, which opened in an afterthought off the kitchen. He sat on the toilet and smoked a last cigarette after first opening a window. The room became cold immediately. He stretched over the tub to reach a towel, which he tucked around his bare thighs. But each time he lifted one hip to flick ashes into the toilet, the towel slipped away, exposing his flesh to the cold. Finally, he abandoned his legs to goose bumps and let the towel slide to the floor where it remained. Later, he examined his face in the mirror, memorizing the best way to hold a smile or the exact level at which his lids should rest in order to create the most awesome effect. The effect was short-lived, shattered by a frown at the sight of another new pimple. He searched a shelf above the basin until he found a small jar of medicated brown ointment, which he daubed over blemishes, real and imaginary.

  Finding nothing else to do, Jolly faced the prospect of bed and the hour or more of sweet-sour restlessness he dreaded and looked forward to each night. He stepped from his clothes beside his cot (the same one he had slept in since he was eight) in the bedroom shared by his mother, only now the room was divided somewhat by a large pasteboard closet from Sears that housed his things, and he let himself noiselessly and naked into the bed, while from the other side of the partition his mother mentally shook her head, and she closed her ears against the sounds of this boy’s night terror and ecstasy.

  This boy—Jolly—wasn’t like the other one. For that matter, as far as she could tell, he wasn’t like anybody either on her side or his father’s, not that she knew much about the man she had married late and lived with for a quarter of a century when he was home, and home had been a dozen places where he left her until he sent her money to move to another tiny, barren town where, he believed, his luck would turn. After twelve years of teaching in the same country school she and her six brothers and sisters had attended, passing twice each day over the same hickory-shaded foot bridge that led everywhere from her own father’s farm, she had resigned herself to what her kindly older sisters called her “calling,” watching silently as those sisters, and the younger one, and the boys each married and began to take hold in hilly Tennessee country.

  For a year, between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-two, she watched the comings and goings of the blue-eyes-wild Jimmy Osment, who seemed to have swooped down from the north one day, from Indiana, some said. She watched the sawmill take shape from old ruins along Sandcastle Creek as she walked to and from the school. Mattawilde could not have said when the day came when she first paused in the obscurity of hickory shade to watch the brown, muscled back that seemed by nature to be turned. She could not have said whether she was shocked or intrigued by the tales that sprang up about his night work, which ranged, if the stories could be believed, not only throughout the whole length and width of their valley, but clear over the mountains into the next county, and farther. She did know personally one girl—only a slip of a girl, really, not more than seventeen or eighteen—who had taken that brown-edged white grin for more than it meant, and who had since moved away to live with an aunt for some months. Mattawilde could not have even said for sure the exact day when, after the mill was finished and operating, she had stopped beneath the limbs while a cold fall rain drizzled, and Jimmy Osment stepped into her path from the other side of a tree, grinning and cracking two hickory nuts together in his hand, sending the muscles of his arm pacing up to where the sleeve of his blue denim shirt was ripped off at the shoulder.

  The first boy—Jamie—was like that. From the beginning he was lusty and belligerent and independent and blue-eyes-wild. With him Mattawilde knew what to expect—the unexpected—because Jamie was really Jimmy again. He seemed to have grown up before he was a child, and while they lived in the country (but now far to the west), before Jimmy died of a stupid, city-bred disease, Jamie at fifteen had already begun to range from their valley into the other valleys and then into town, sometimes not reappearing for three or four days, then to grin, and she couldn’t be angry, and he would stay around home fighting with Jimmy, or leading his younger brother patiently over wide arcs in the hills and back home again for the days it took for his horse to rest and her to mend the rips and tears in his shirts.

  Jamie never talked much. He didn’t have to. She knew what was on his mind even when he said nothing. When his father died, Jamie showed the only sign of emotion he had ever shown to anyone, and that surprised her. He went on another year to finish high school in town, more, most believed, out of malice than from any desire to own a diploma. He came back once after that to the country place, and although he didn’t say it, she knew as she mended his shirts that he was going—for good, probably. He did not say goodbye to her, b
ut he did stop halfway down the lane, right before it bent out of sight, to pet Pekoe and lay his hand for a moment on the head of Jolly, who stood from his sticks-and-rocks ant corral to watch him turn the corner.

  TWO

  JAMIE OSMENT and Mandis Patterson were both awakened by the sun’s first slant across their eyes. Both half turned where they slept and reached out a hand toward someone they expected to find. Neither found anyone. He blinked toward the sun, then hunkered himself and the wadded blanket over two feet until his head was again in the shadow of the shagged tamarisk. He turned his face into his arms and fought against the sun already mirroring across the river.

  She bent the outstretched arm under herself and raised to peer into the crib. Her gaze, and then her smile, was met by the solemn blue eyes of the boy who had been watching her silently and wet for some minutes, his face tightly squeezed against two bars of the crib that hid enough of the sides of his face to make it look thin and ’possum-like. His white fists grasped two other bars. He was entirely still except for his bare legs, which hung on the outside of his crib and swung slowly out and back.

  The woman seemed thinner and paler without makeup, without her nylon waitress uniform that at this moment hung miraculously perk where it had dripped itself dry during the night on its hanger crooked over the shower rod above the tub. In the green gown, its straps edged in frayed, stiff lace, her neck seemed long and the muscles of it tight beneath the long strands of vari-blond hair. But as she leaned from the bed to run her finger down the nose of the boy, her full body urged against the thin material of her gown.

  As she changed the baby and then padded, her bare feet on bare linoleum floors, across the room to set him among the sun-strands, she talked to him—not as you would talk to a baby, but as if he were much older. He watched her as she moved, laughing afresh each time her voice began.

  “You know who I thought—who I was dreaming about?” she said, and he laughed. “Yes, you know. But you can’t know.”

  She took from the diminutive ice-box a bottle of milk, and a pan from the stove. “I think your eyes are getting bluer,” she said. “Like his.” The boy laughed but turned his startled gaze for a moment to a sparrow that flicked onto the window sill and off again to zip beyond his vision over the tar-topped roofs that squeezed like hunchbacked shoulders behind the apartment house.

  “Sometimes I think you’re a idiot. The way you laugh.” She poured warm milk into the bowl of cereal and mixed it, then set it before the boy, between his knees. He smiled and dipped one hand into the bowl. “Ah, wait,” she said. “I’ll feed you.” She wiped the hand on a red-edged cloth and sat before the boy to feed him.

  “You know something? Someday. Someday,” she said. “Stop that. You have to grow up, don’t you? Someday he’ll see you, and you have to be big, don’t you? You’ll be big and black-haired and blue-eyed. Did you know that?”

  The boy laughed and stretched out his oatmeal-slimed hand to touch the wet streaks on her face.

  Jamie dug his face deeper into the blanket and flinched his shoulders to ward off a sticky ink-blue fly before he flung himself over angrily and sat up. He turned to stare at the bright water and the sand and yawned. He looked for his shirt. It lay a few feet away over the hood of his car—not a new car, but one that looked fast, lowered in the old style the way it was, with rear fender skirts that exposed only a shallow curve of white-walled tire sunk sadly into the scuffed sand. He focused on the shirt and willed it to come the ten feet to him. Deciding whether or not the fly and the cigarettes were reason enough to walk to the shirt occupied the time of another yawn. Then he saw his pants lying in a black crumple where they had fallen beside the fender. With almost meticulous concern he ran his hands along the outside of his thighs and looked to see what, if anything, remained on his person of his clothes. The revelation was enough to cause him to arise and grab up his clothes.

  He buttoned his pants and then unbuttoned them again and stepped behind the tree in whose shadow he had earlier crept. Finding a tree was only part of country habit. Little obscurity this one offered on the long and wide stretch of sand dotted but sparsely with ugly tamarisks.

  He shook the blanket violently to rid it of sand and began to fold it, making sure that the corners fitted precisely. From the rumpled sand he picked a barely-burned cigarette. Beside it, nearly buried, lay a black velvet hair ribbon that he turned over in his hand and then dropped again. He thought of the girl and laughed. She had been OK, but if she wanted to take off for town before it was really even light enough to see, that was also OK. She’d been willing enough to ride this far when he picked her up early the night before in the bus station at El Centre. “Which way you going?” she had asked in answer to his question. He had grinned and shrugged. “I don’t care. That way, I guess,” he said and nodded east. “All right,” she said and swung her legs, knees together, around on the stool at the coffee counter.

  Jamie threw the folded blanket onto the back seat of the car and grinned dimly to himself. They had spent the late hours of the night rolled together here in that blanket beside the river at Needles after she was practically hysterical from the cold, fast water and the wine and the sight of him standing white and dark above her.

  She’d been OK, but she had wanted to talk, even after. She had said a lot of stupid things. Really funny, they were. And she had cried for a time. Finally he had told her if she didn’t like his company just the way it was and the way it was going to be, she could get the hell out. “Out? Out?” she had screamed. “How much outer can you get?” She had untangled herself from the blanket and fished around in the car for her clothes. “In, that’s what I want. Don’t they have no hotels in this goddamn town?” She was really screwy from the wine and the drunk things she had said. He’d asked her why she didn’t go see had they any hotels in this goddamn town, and she said that that was just exactly what she intended to do. He had watched her worm into her sweater in the pale glow of the car’s dome light. She yanked her imitation leather suitcase from the back seat and faced him again. “Oh, don’t you worry none about me,” she said. “I can get work.” He had laughed again and said he didn’t doubt that. Only, he had added, if he was her he’d get himself checked by a doctor. That had stopped her in her high-heeled tracks. “What you mean?” she demanded. “You got something? What’re you talking about?” He hadn’t answered. “Jesus. I got pneumonia, probably, and sand and I don’t know what all in it, and now you tell me. Jesus,” she repeated. Jamie had lain on the blanket and listened to the angry scrunch of her shoes long after he couldn’t see her at all in the swarthy dawn.

  Jamie backed the car carefully through the sand up to the road that the conservation people had built along the beach. He listened to the sound of the engine for a time, then switched on the radio and slowly turned the dial until a clear station blared folk music.

  He was only a hundred and fifty miles from home—or rather, from the house where his mother and Jolly now lived. He reckoned that he might as well push on. The postcard said he’d be there yesterday.

  “His postcard said he’d be here yesterday. Now I’m worried.” Mattawilde fussed at the kitchen stove. She snatched at the coffee pot when it began to spew over onto the electric burner.

  “Two years and now you’re worried?” Jolly dumped more sugar into the oatmeal. “I hate oatmeal,” he said, adding butter and too much milk.

  “Well, that’s what you’re getting. It’s good for you.”

  “Yeh. Why’s everything good for me that’s either green or slimy? Or both. Like okra. Jeez.”

  “Hush up and eat or you’ll be late. I hope he didn’t wreck. He always did drive too fast, to my way of thinking. You want coffee? It isn’t good for you,” she said, but she set a cup by his plate.

  “Don’t worry, Mom. He’ll be here. What’re you so worked up about? He’s been running loose since before I was born, it seems to me. This coffee tastes like the Mississippi.”

  “Well, don’t drink
it then. I got things on my mind this morning.” She wiped her hands on her apron and took up her own cup.

  Jolly added more sugar to the coffee. “I wish I had something on mine. I’ve got a test this morning on about a thousand years of American literature.”

  “You study? Never mind, Lord knows the answer to that.”

  “Well, if He knows the answers to that test, I could sure use—”

  “Jolliff. Watch your mouth. And eat.” She got up to run water in the dishpan that rocked slightly, its rim balanced on the edges of the sink.

  “I already did.”

  “And speaking of books and things, I been taking notice of your reading matter lately.”

  “What reading matter? What’s wrong with my reading matter?”

  “That King’s Row was out of the shelf. You didn’t make a report on that, did you?”

  “Sure I did. What’s wrong with that?”

  “I don’t think you ought to be allowed to read that kind a book.” Mattawilde flung soap powder into the dishwater. “Full a perverts, and I don’t know what all. It’s a regular come-off, that’s what it is.”

  “Mother, I’m old enough to read what I please, it seems to me. It’s just a story, after all.”

  “Well, you young people today read things I never read till I was grown and married. I don’t know what’s going to come of it.”

  “It’s just been catching dust there for about fifty years. It’s Jamie’s book. If Jamie could read it, I don’t see why I can’t.”

  “Never you mind, young man. That’s different.”

  “Yeh. What’s so different about Jamie?” Jolly stood up from the table. “What’s so—so different?” he finished weakly.

  “Never mind, I said. You’ll be late.”

  “Well, I just want you to know that if you think I learned anything I didn’t already know, you’re crazy—I mean, you’re wrong. I could make you up a reading list that would—”