Jolly Read online

  “Watch,” said Luke. He took the button from Jolly, pushed it into the hole in the dead man’s flesh, and screwed it twice. “Now he won’t leak.”

  Jolly stared at the button incongruously attached to the pale flesh. He felt another giggle rise toward his throat but stalled it by looking away and speaking rapidly. “Now whataya do? When do you put the makeup on him? Do you put shorts or anything on him before you put on his regular clothes? When’s the funeral?”

  When Luke and his father had dressed the man in a white shirt and blue tie and a dark, pin-stripe suit, after transferring him to another table, George Meaders bent over the body once more and combed the gray hair smoothly back from his forehead. Suddenly Jolly allowed himself to recall that this was, or had been, a human being. The naked figure on whom they had just performed a miracle against decay became again a reposed, middle-aged man who had been—until this afternoon when he lay down for a nap—a busy, breathing, working man, someone’s relative, someone’s husband, someone’s enemy; someone’s father now at rest, ridiculously, on a bare wooden table in a suit without any back to it, furnished as part of the expense of being inalienably dead.

  “Christ, I’m hungry. And Mom’ll be madder’n hell. Drive me, Luke?”

  SIX

  JOLLY tossed his books onto the back shelf of the Blue Goose among the litter of red-penciled papers, backless textbooks, pencil stubs, athletic socks, one athletic supporter partially obscured inside a stiff, rolled towel, and two naked-breasted Hawaiian dolls whose grass hips wobbled on springs at the least provocation.

  “Hey, horse patookus.”

  “Hey, Luke.”

  “You almost missed the train.” The back tires spun in the gravel as Luke jostled into the line of cars waiting to cross the bridge.

  “No feminine types, artist? You’re losing your touch. More likely, you’re touching too much.”

  “Yeh? What do squirrels gather in the fall?” The car squealed onto the pavement.

  “Nuts. And keep your goddam hands to yourself.”

  “Look out. You damn near made me run over that old lady,” Luke laughed.

  “No points for old ladies.”

  Luke turned the car onto Montezuma Street and slowed for the cruise once around the courthouse plaza. “Well?” he asked. “Who’d you get?”

  “For tomorrow night?”

  “Yes. Some a your prizes or something, no doubt.”

  “Lucas, baby, you better get a good hold on it, because I really fixed us up this time.”

  “Who? Don’t just set there, a-hole. Who’d you get?”

  “For you, dad, I got Babe Wooten.”

  “No kidding? Wow!” Luke whistled once, long and shrill.

  “And for me, Di Carson,” Jolly said with more than a note of triumph.

  “Now I know you’re kidding.”

  “No crap. I really did. And you can pull in right there at Doogle’s and buy me a big fat strawberry soda to prove your everlasting affection.”

  “Jeez, I’ll buy ya two. No kidding? You wouldn’t yank on an old buddy, would you?”

  “Call ’em up, if you don’t believe me.”

  The two boys pushed open the glass doors of Doogle’s Center Drug and searched for vacant stools together. After they had given their order Luke whistled again. “I still don’t believe it. Where’ll we take ’em?” he asked.

  “They want to go down to Skull Valley for the Saturday night dance. You want a cigarette?”

  “No. Yes. This calls for a celebration.”

  “Look at the Baptist pillar, would you. Sin and shame.”

  Luke puffed at the cigarette awkwardly. “What do they want to go there for?”

  “They’ve no doubt heard rumors that that’s where the big boys go to play on a Saturday night.”

  “Yeh. Well, this boy’s big enough to play. Babe Wooten! God. Say, you’ve been to those dances before. What’re they really like?”

  “Jeez, I was about eight at the time.”

  “Eight! What the hell could you do at eight, for chrissake?”

  “Very little except dance. As a matter of fact, at that age you went to them to dance. Real shit-kickin’ music, too,” Jolly winked.

  “I bet.” Luke blew smoke down a straw and watched it bubble out the top of his soda like a miniature strawberry volcano.

  “Say, Joll,” Luke whispered, “we better get some rubbers.”

  “Dreamer. Anyway, I have one.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Remember in that service station out by Freddy’s? You got a package, too.”

  “Christ, that was six months ago. It won’t be no good now, if it ever was.”

  “Why? I haven’t used it—dammit.”

  Luke wagged his head in disgust. “Why, you can’t keep ’em that long. They deter—tederio—”

  “Deteriorate.”

  “Yeh. It’d be rotten by now. Why’d ya keep it so long?”

  Jolly snorted. “What was I supposed to use it for, a goddam balloon?”

  Luke lowered his voice more. “Hey, Joll, we could buy some right here. Right over there. You just go put fifty cents on the counter and hold up two fingers. He’ll know what you mean.”

  “Not me, dad. You ever done it?”

  Luke bent his cigarette in an ash tray. “No,” he said,

  “Well, me neither. And I’m not about to. Couldn’t you swipe some of your father’s?”

  “Hell, the last time I looked I couldn’t find none. I don’t think he uses them anymore or something.”

  “Do you reckon he’s too old?” Jolly asked.

  “I don’t know. I wonder how old ya hafta be before you got to stop.”

  “What worries me is, how old do you hafta be to start, for chrissake.”

  “Tomorrow night could tell the tale, son.” Luke swung off the stool. “Let’s go.”

  They drove west across town, squinting against the four-thirty sun that cast long shadows from the trunks of the trees on the plaza, belying the heat. At the curb before Jolly’s house Luke asked, “You seen your brother yet?”

  Jolly lifted the door handle but did not open the door. “No,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ, he’s been here a week. Or more. How come you haven’t seen him?”

  “Oh, I’ll see him sometime, I guess.” Jolly laughed, but shortly. “He seems to come calling when he knows I’m not here. Piss on him. I don’t give a shit, any more.”

  Luke watched Jolly’s face for a moment, then turned to face the windshield. “Yeh. Not much, you don’t.” Luke tapped the steering wheel with his fingers. “What the hell’s the matter with him anyway? He must be as crazy as you—”

  “Not a goddam thing’s the matter with him.”

  “OK, OK. Well, patookus, you gettin’ out?”

  Jolly opened the door. “Yes.”

  “What do you wear to one a those dances, Joll?”

  “If you don’t want to look like a slicker, you’d better wear Levis. I told the girls we’d pick them up about nine. It takes about an hour to get there.”

  Luke grinned. “And about three to get back?”

  “Depends on the circumcisions.” Jolly shut the car door and ran up the path toward home as the Blue Goose’s tires cried.

  “Hi, Mom,” Jolly said in passing on his way to the bedroom.

  “Hi, Jolly-Bo. How was school?”

  “OK.”

  His mother came to the door of the bedroom, a large wooden spoon in her hand. She pushed her old wobbly glasses down on her nose and peered over them. “You-all going out tonight after supper?” She pronounced the “r” like an “a.”

  “No. I don’t think so.” Jolly considered the advisability of telling her about his proposed plans for the following night. He decided for it. “We’re going down to S.V. tomorrow night.”

  “What for?” She took off her glasses and wiped them carelessly on her gingham apron.

  “Luke and I are taking some girls to the dan
ce.”

  “The Skull Valley dance?”

  Jolly heard the edge tighten about her lips. “You-all got no business at that dance.”

  “Aw, Mom. I went when I was six, for chrissake. Excuse me.”

  “You better watch your language, young man. It’s a crying shame the way you talk. Hang that shirt up. And that was different. You didn’t know anything that was going on when you were six. Anyway, I think you were at least eight before I let you go.”

  “OK, Mom, OK. You gonna stand right there? I’m changing clothes, you know.”

  She didn’t leave, but she turned her head to face the other room. “Who are the girls?”

  “Just some girls at school. You don’t know them.”

  “Do they go to our church?”

  “No. I think they’re Methodists, or Episcopalians, or something.”

  She turned her head back toward him and stepped closer. “You been smoking again, haven’t you. Don’t tell me different. I can smell you from here to kingdom come. It’s a crying shame. Smoking and dancing and staying out half the night and I don’t know what all. Lord have mercy, I wish your father was here. He’d put a stop to it. Put on some shoes. I want you to run to the store for me ’fore supper.”

  “I don’t need shoes on to go to the store,” Jolly said, happy to change a subject he wished he had never mentioned. “It’s only two blocks. What do you want?”

  “Here’s a little list. And don’t buy those vegetables ’less they’re good an’ fresh. Now run along,” she said, moving back into her kitchen, wooden spoon poised.

  Jolly found a pine cone in the path leading from his house. He kicked it with his bare toes twice before it bounced away into a shrub. He walked in the dirt easement between the sidewalk and the street down to Mrs. Adlow’s house. There he stepped up on her low brick wall and with exaggerated waving of arms balanced himself to the corner of the first block.

  “Off that wall, young man,” called Mrs. Adlow from her flower bed at the angle of the wall.

  Jolly stood atop the wall and gazed down on her. “Your petunias are beautiful this year, Mrs. Adlow.”

  A smile overtook the unnatural frown on her face. “Why, thank you, Jolly. Do you really think so? I was afraid they weren’t going to do so good this year. They got a late start. Mr. Adlow said they’d never amount to a thing, but I told him that if anybody could make ’em grow, I could, so I just got out here and—”

  Jolly jumped off the wall and continued his own thoughts, leaving Mrs. Adlow’s ruffled petunias to hear hers.

  His thoughts returned to Di Carson, and as he reviewed her known file, he wondered again why, when you diagrammed complex sentences and parenthesized the American Revolution with dates, you used your head, but when you thought of girls, and boys and girls, you used your stomach. Maybe after tomorrow night… Well, if anybody would, Di would. Everybody said so. Weren’t she and Babe Wooten known in the locker room as the dirty duo? He swung precariously from a too-young aspen limb that bent out over the sidewalk. Would he know what to do if she would, he wondered. Everybody said you would know when the time came, never fear. He had asked Jamie about that, too, two years ago when he had come home for three days. Yes, Jamie had agreed, you’d know when the time was right, and he’d grinned when Jolly admitted, at fourteen, that the nearest thing he’d ever done to or had done by a girl hearkened back to before Jamie had left home in Skull Valley when he and Jolly came upon Francee Epum in the swamp, and Jamie had made Francee let Jolly stay for a while until he had a chance to see her undressed, and she had made Jolly drop his pants, too, as payment. She had laughed and measured the difference between the little brother and the big one before Jamie had sent him on home with Pekoe.

  And Guppy, who was too simple to lie, just three weeks ago told Jolly and Luke and a half-dozen others in the gymnasium basement how he had lured Di, without much trouble, down there during a school dance and showed them the bench that ran before his locker where she had lain and how much trouble it was, the two of them trying not to teeter off the narrow bench and how they took a shower together afterwards where things got out of hand again. Jolly believed him because when he had finished his eyes were vacant, and he walked to the other end of the locker room and shut himself in the coach’s john, the one with the metal door; that and a certain reverent tone of voice like a country preacher revealing for the first time the wonders of Sodom and Gomorrah to a barefooted, toe-twisting shock of Sunday angels.

  SEVEN

  AS THE long black car dipped down the last hill its headlights struck the shallow water of Hassayampa Creek, which signaled the beginning of the valley proper. The four of them were riding in the front seat of the mortuary limousine. Behind them, like a different room, the interior of the over-sized car stretched away solemnly.

  For the last few minutes Jolly had not spoken. With his forehead pressed against the window glass he watched for signs of anything familiar along the roadside in the new night. He wished it were daylight to better see those things that he had not seen once in eight years.

  The first recognizable object was the silhouette of the ruined adobe wall, momentarily visible against the skyline, which surrounded twenty low heaps of stones, purportedly the time-forgotten burial grounds of some small Indian band whose numbers had been further diminished at this spot by an encounter with white men, or perhaps another, hostile, Indian tribe. Jolly opened his mouth to speak, to explain the interest of the adobe wall, but no one else had seen it, evidently. He said nothing and saw nothing else within memory, except the two-lane dirt road ducking and hiding from the car’s headlights, until they came to the white creek.

  “What the hell’s water doing in the middle of the road?” asked Luke, stepping too hard on the brakes. The car slid down to the edge of the water where it stopped while the dust rolled over the hood and pranced in the beams.

  “Not deep,” said Jolly. “Go on across.” He watched the water separate to the side of the car and ripple in dwarf rage. If you drank from the Hassayampa, it was said, you’d never again speak the truth.

  Immediately beyond, Jolly saw the great trunks of the cottonwoods standing crooked and pale around what had been a favorite church picnic grounds, and he recalled, incongruously, the embarrassment Bethamae Epum had caused him by complaining shrilly to their Sunday School teacher that he had purposely hiked up her dress.

  “You guys bring any more beer?” Babe Wooten was asking.

  The narrow road that led into the hills and eventually to the Cranshaver’s where no one had ever trespassed and where, it was said, their idiot boy was chained in a lean-to and ate from the same dish with the dogs.

  Oh I had lotsa trouble makin’ Mary,

  Mary’s ma and paw don’t care for me,

  Luke sang.

  The lake, how little it looked now lying flat and undisturbed by moonlight, where they—Jolly and Jamie—had pulled the still gasping body of Mickey Fernandez out by his ankles one afternoon and watched, frenzied, as his eyes rolled back under the curls on his forehead, and he died in the wet reeds at their feet.

  So just to save a fight,

  And make everything all right,

  I’ll meet my Mary by the zoo, you see.

  The hill behind Old Lady Decker’s cheerless hermitage, eroded, its few trees growing at angles from the clay, where each summer the torrential rains disemboweled another of her ancestors to send his bones and decayed cottonwood coffin slithering down into the road where they remained except for what the dogs scavenged until someone called for a county official who shoveled them onto his truck and drove away, where, no one asked.

  On Monday I’ll have Mary by the camels,

  That’s the place that Mary oughta be,

  The lame fieldstone house where the two simple sisters, Clara and Eva, had lived alone since long before their memory when they were not out foraging in someone’s apple orchard or melon field and who bought a new gas stove when there had never been electricity to Skull V
alley much less gas and who walked to their nearest neighbors every day for assistance in lighting the stove.

  Tuesday by the bears,

  Wednesday by the hares,

  The general store shrinking with age nevertheless as indominable as its mistress who operated it before, during, and after four husbands in succession, the last of whom died of pneumonia from lying on his back in the rain to tinker with the undersides of his jalopy, and which housed a cache of out-priced candy and soda pop—fascinating to the eyes of a child who never tasted of either except at Christmas—as well as a minute post office for persons who could afford a dollar a month for the privilege of twisting a brass combination lock or who otherwise had to ask for their mail at the barred window providing the proprietess was not busy in another part of the store.

  Thursday by the deer, my dear, you see.

  The stone bridge over Kirkland Creek spanning an ordinarily dry bed of sand that two or three times a year raged and foamed about the ankles of a small boy who had to cross it two miles farther down on his way home from school in the company of his older brother, who scoffed at the treachery of the water until one spring one of his own friends was surprised while in the middle of the creek bed by the four-foot tumble of muddy water roaring down upon him from the mountains and whose arms flung over his head were little defense against the maelstrom that carried his body seventeen miles and three days and left it like a hapless yearling butchered in a barbed wire cage beside the creek.

  On Friday I’ll have Mary by the monkies,

  Swingin’ on her little rings of brass,

  The little green-roofed cabin, now tilting precariously toward the creek bed where clubfooted Harry Band—called Bandy by the adults and Harry the Happy Homo by Jamie and the big boys—had lived for ten years content to do part-time work in the general store for his meals and lodging until he was found one morning in his cabin unclothed, his head bashed in with his own specially-built shoe by a passing hobo, some thought, although a coffee can of small bills and change sat undisturbed on a bedside table and it could have been any one of several young men to whom Bandy offered a drink and affection.