Jolly Page 8

  The young children scrambled wildly about the dance hall capturing and bartering partners until all were at least partially content with their mates. The adults moved with affected casualness among the children.

  To Jolly the scene had not changed, really, in eight years. He rolled the back of his head against the polished boards of the wall. He saw the anticipation of one small boy who, wide-eyed, awaited the start of the music, oblivious of the denim-frocked girl whose hand he held from the greatest possible distance…

  All around the mulberry bush

  The ’possum chased the weasel

  and who chewed her lip in concentration in order to better execute her skips and bobs. Mulberry bush: mulberry tree, it should be, down near the swamp, halfway to the McGowan’s chicken ranch. Purple rain from shook limbs. Purple hands in galvanized buckets. Purple toes until September. Purple steaming from slatted crusts before the lamps were lighted.

  Pop! goes the weasel

  A funny song—funny to the West. It had traveled in consort with “Turkey in the Straw” from somewhere among distant mountains and found a compatible transplant here in the valley named from death. Funny. There had never been a ’possum nor a weasel in Skull Valley so far as anyone knew.

  The tow-headed boy stamped by, breathlessly intent lest he miss the signal to pop through the opening again. His alien oxfords, dust-covered and not a little scuffed about the toes, lifted unnaturally high at each step.

  “What in hell they doin’ now?” asked Luke suddenly at Jolly’s side, his arm monopolizing Babe’s shoulders.

  “It’s just a play-party dance,” Jolly answered and continued to roll the back of his head against the wall, gently.

  “God. That’d kill me, sure,” said Babe.

  “You seen Di?” Luke asked.

  “Nope.” He faced Luke briefly as his head rolled that way. “And wipe that goddam lipstick off your face.”

  “Jolly?”

  “Yeh, Luke.”

  “You ready to cut out?”

  Jolly watched the little girl in the denim frock skip by pinkly. “No matter to me. You?” He continued to roll his head over the crack between two boards.

  “Well, you coming?” Luke was anxious.

  “In a minute. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Luke and Babe disappeared through the door. Jolly let himself drift with the raucous music as it beat through the heat and whirring color of the room.

  When the dance ended Jolly pushed from the wall with his shoulders. As he was about to leave, past the woman with the clover stamp, Di’s voice spoke from behind him. “Jolly?”

  Bill Kemp stood to one side and a little behind her. “Jolly?” Her bare shoulders and chest were damp and reflected the yellow light and changed it to glimpses of green and red. Her breath was short, perhaps from dancing.

  “You ready to leave?” Jolly asked, reaching for her arm. Bill Kemp touched her other arm at the elbow, and she moved back a step.

  “I’m going home with him,” she said. She brushed a damp strand of hair back on her temple. “I’m sorry, Jolly—”

  “But, Di. Look, we—” Jolly watched Bill Kemp’s arm contract, drawing Di closer to him without moving himself forward at all. The thumb of his other hand was hooked into the front pocket of his Levis, the fingers splayed down in a token gesture of concealment.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t know, Jolly. You just don’t.” For the first time, Di Carson looked cowed. She ducked her eyes and turned her face half toward Bill Kemp. As he pushed her past, he eyed Jolly from beneath his low-creased hat and winked. Jolly watched them cross the porch and go down the steps among the rows of parked cars and muddy pickup trucks.

  “Bitch!” Jolly said, and the woman with the clover stamp looked up, startled. She said nothing, but she watched the boy who was vaguely familiar as he hung against a porch post a moment and then strode off into the dark.

  He opened the door of the limousine and slid into the driver’s seat.

  “You ever find Di?” Babe asked from the back seat.

  “Yeh, I found her.” Jolly backed the car through a narrow space in the lot.

  “Well?”

  The lights picked out the gate, and he pointed the car that way.

  “You just gonna leave without her?”

  “She’ll get home.”

  “God, she’d better,” said Babe. “I’m stayin’ at her house tonight. Her folks is outa town.”

  “If you’re locked out, baby, I’ll find you a bed,” said Luke.

  “Hm?” was the last sound Babe made for a while.

  Jolly headed the car down the dirt road toward the opposite end of the valley from which they had entered. He drove slowly for nearly a mile, not seeing the doll-house yellow and red Santa Fe depot as he passed nor hearing the two great engines letting off excess steam from beneath their black bellies as they took water in turn from the crazy funnel that swung out on its elbow over the tracks, fifty feet from the road. He turned into a long lane darkened by interlocking cottonwood limbs. At the end of the lane he stopped the car, left the engine running, and got out to open a wood and barbed wire gate that creaked back against the fence and opened the way down the embankment to the creek bed. Jolly studied the crossing and the road reaching up the opposite bank as best he could in the beam from the car’s lights. Satisfied, he walked back to the car and drove cautiously across the sand until almost to the farther bank where he stepped hard on the accelerator and bit his underlip until the heavy city car heaved up and over, its underside scraping the top edge of the bank.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Luke and fell silent once more.

  Jolly parked the car a little distance from the creek bank, under the protective limbs of a cluster of oaks. “I’m going for a walk,” he said and slammed the door shut before hearing an answer, if there was one.

  He followed the two dirt tracks of the road, anticipating each turn or shallow ravine before coming upon it. The late-setting light picked out the fence line as it appeared from time to time parallel with the road. He passed by three moonstruck cows standing silent and curious among the oaks. Jolly chuckled. “You stupid cows,” he said. “And I used to run like hell from your grandmothers.” He chucked a stone at them and laughed aloud as they snorted and whirled, crashing into the brush, their tails high in the pale light.

  At the spot in the road where it entered a tunnel of wild and ancient grape vines, Jolly paused. He peered into the blackness through which not one spark of light shone. He stepped off the road and took the short cut across an open pasture, knowing he would meet the road on the other side where it curved out of the tunnel near the elderberry bushes. Even Jamie would never pass through the grapevine tunnel at night—not to watch Jesus walk the water on the other side.

  Huge against the sky he saw the circle of cotton-woods that had once formed the outer boundary of his world when he was allowed to wander alone. The trees had been planted in a circle, perhaps seventy-five feet across, as green fence posts for a corral long before Jolly’s father and mother rolled into Skull Valley on the Santa Fe day coach, he restless to explore new lands, she tremorous as Tennessee moved farther and farther away. The posts had grown into trees, fed by the underground springs that flowed into the swamp, slowly wrapping their bark over the barbed wire stapled to their trunks like patient snakes gorging themselves in new spring.

  Jolly left the path and walked into the circle of trees picking his way over the shattered brittle limbs that lay confused on the ground. As he passed each tree his hand remembered. When he came to a young tree standing three or four feet inside the circle, he stopped. “You’re new,” he said aloud. Then he laughed as if someone might have been near to hear him talking to a tree. He placed one foot on either side of the tree and ran his hands up and down over the bark. It was smoother than the older cottonwoods, but its white skin had already begun to develop the bumps and crevices common to its type. Jolly pressed his face against the cool bark, and his
arms encircled the young trunk. “Goddamit,” he said. His face began to throb from holding it too tightly to the bark. Beyond the circle of trees he saw the pools of water in the swamp reflect the darkling moon. As he watched, the pools began to whirl in colors. Slowly, then more frantically, the kaleidoscopic colors mixed in time to the heat of Jolly’s pulse against the tree. He closed his eyes and let the pools whirl in and out among his desires. His hands moved restlessly and without reason over the white bark. Tightly, rhythmically, to the beat of the pulse in his temples he pressed all of his body against the tree.

  He lay against the damp young body of the cotton-wood a long time while his breath became regular again, and the pools of color settled back in the swamp. He felt his face with his fingers and could trace on his skin the marks the bark had left. He pushed back from the tree and carefully lifted and bent one leg after the other and felt gingerly the sore, raw places on the inside of his thighs.

  He walked stiffly to one of the pools and squatted beside it on a wobbly hillock of grass that stood round, stump-like from the water. A person could travel a whole morning, maybe a whole day, through the swamp under the willows by stepping or jumping from one hillock to another.

  The water was not cool on his face until after the breeze caught it.

  Back on the road, beyond the cottonwoods and the swamp, as he approached the top of the last small hill Jolly watched the single track at his feet. When he felt he had reached the summit, a deep breath shuddered upward over his body.

  He lifted his eyes toward the house and saw—nothing. Nothing but the heavenly tree forlornly genuflecting in the night air as it had done for twenty years. Where the house should have stood, its tin roof reflecting silver, Jolly could make out only a dark rectangle deep in the shagged carpet of weeds.

  He scowled and shifted his direction toward where the barn should have been. Another dark rectangle; flat, dead. The water tower, too, and the windmill; they did not stand against the skyline as they should. The three peach trees—where were they? The pear tree from which he had flown and broken an arm—where was it?

  Jolly sat on a granite boulder beside the road and with his chin on his hands surveyed the private ruin below him. It was not hard to re-silver the windmill so that it sparkled as it whirled water from low in the ground, or more likely, mud and bits of rotted gopher fur, because for the three hot summer months you had to haul drinking water in bellied iron barrels from some neighbor’s well if you could find a truck to borrow, and you carried pails of green water from the swamp, trip after trip, for Mama to heat on the cook stove for clothes washing and Saturday baths until the late summer gully-washers foamed into the valley from the mountains, inundating everything as they came, nearly always spreading out flat clear up to the foundation of the house and leaving a dead mule or a white-faced cow to be dragged away from the sloping pasture before the house.

  It was easy to re-pink the fruit trees in April in hopes the blooms would not be bitten by late frost (except those twigs that stood in blue vases on the library table). If the blossoms survived the frost, the young fruit had only to survive a water-lean summer—and wash water was some help—and the cardinals and mockingbirds and the black and yellow finches and the buckshot from Jamie’s 20-gauge, and then they’d be ripe for picking. Nell Ann grumbled, but she preferred peeling any number of peaches to the risk of being blown to kingdom come by Mama’s formidable pressure cooker from whence emerged enough jars of preserved fruit to last the winter, provided the winter was short-lived.

  It was not too hard to rebuild the barn. The single-gabled roof rose high overhead above the empty stalls on one side and above the molded hay piles and boxes of extra Mason jars and the worn tack on the other. It was in this barn that Jamie and Jolly killed Brown Bossy through the kindness of all the barley and mash she could eat, although she lived enough hours to give birth to Beauty, a spindly-legged calf who occupied a place of esteem about the barn for the months it took to wean her of the baby bottle. Directly above the spot where Bossy gave up the ghost ran a high beam the length of the barn on which you could see gray mice scurrying most any hour of the day, and if the season were right and you pestered them with clods of dry manure, they would drop the half-eaten bloody bodies of their pink babies down on your head as if to say, “Here, take them, you want them so bad, but leave us be.”

  It would be harder to replant the yellow rose hedge that grew up one side of the path from the heavenly tree nearly to the front porch steps, although the nasturtium bed along the porch would riot again easily enough. It always had.

  To rebuild the house itself would be next to impossible, because it would require the repossession from wherever they had been carted of each weathered plank, each rusted nail, every worn floorboard, every tin roof-patch (added at the rate of about four a year to discourage the flow of rain water inside the house). Once the materials were reassembled, the reconstruction of the house would be easier, because Jolly and Jamie and Nell Ann could tell you where every board went, how high every ceiling should be, how far it was from the back bedroom to the isinglass-eyed wood heater in the front room where pajamas were exchanged, reluctantly, for long woolen underwear every winter morning. Once the house was finished, anybody could throw the wire fence around it. Get someone to help hoist the water tank back on its timbers and realign the chicken pen—strongly this time so the coyotes will have to work to get in—and you’ll be practically finished.

  But where would you get a father? You can’t play house without a mother and a father, even if he did only show up now and then. And what about Jamie? Nell Ann would come back and bring her own two children, but Jamie never would or if he did come back he’d never stay.

  Jolly stood from the boulder, and his eyes swept over the land. He kicked a rock with his shoe and watched it tumble haltingly down the slope, sparking against other rocks, spurting tiny dust storms at each bounce until it rolled a few feet out onto the flat ground and stopped. He turned back the way he had come.

  The heavenly tree bobbed in the night air as it had for twenty years.

  As Jolly approached the limousine squatting like some carnivorous beast under the oak trees, Luke stepped from the car and walked to meet him at the road.

  “Hi, Luke. How’s the ball game? As if I couldn’t see that grin even in the dark.”

  “Touchdown,” Luke burbled. “Jesus God, Joll.” His breathing was shallow and quick. The words came out on top of his breaths.

  “That good, Luke?”

  “You got a cigarette?”

  Jolly extended the pack. “Piling sin upon sin, my brother. God, you’re shaking like a leaf.” Jolly held Luke’s wrist to steady the match so he could light his own cigarette. “Well? You going to tell me the details or aren’t you?”

  “Yeh, Joll, I will. Only there’s a problem.” Luke laughed nervously.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Goddamit Jolly, I told you we oughta bought some rubbers.” Luke bit the word fiercely with his teeth.

  Jolly smiled. “Don’t tell me. I thought the old Santa Fe always pulled out on time.”

  “So did I. But it didn’t this trip.” Luke puffed morosely on his cigarette. It had gone out, and he flung it angrily into the dirt at his feet. “Goddammit, Jolly, I gotta do something!”

  “Well, what do you expect me to do? At least you got something for your troubles, which is a whole hell of a lot more than I did.”

  “You’re the one made the grades in biology. What’re you supposed to do in a case like this?”

  Jolly snorted. “All we learned about having babies in that class was how the sperm wiggles along until it meets an egg in the uterus or somewhere, and how baby cats look inside their mother three weeks after the tom’s been by.”

  “You’re a buddy.”

  “Doesn’t she have one of those contraptions with the hot water bottle and the tube?”

  “A douche bag? No. I asked her about that. She says only married women
use them.”

  “In that case, I’ll give her one for a wedding present—about next month,” Jolly laughed.

  “All right, smart-ass. She’s pretty worried, too. She don’t know what to do, either.”

  “With her experience, looks like she’d furnish rubbers, for chrissake. I suppose she told you she was a virgin or something.”

  “Come on, Joll, knock it off. I’d help you think of something if you were in this boat.” Luke held Jolly by both arms and gave a shake as if better to transmit his urgency. Suddenly he stopped, his hands gripping Jolly’s upper arms. His eyes grew wide and he grinned, his face level with Jolly’s.

  “Embalming fluid!” he exclaimed.

  “What? Are you some kind of a nut?”

  “That’s it! Embalming fluid! That’ll kill anything,” Luke cried happily.

  “Including Babe Wooten?” Jolly asked.

  “No, it won’t hurt her none. I don’t think it will, anyhow.” A small frown passed over his brow.

  “What’s she gonna do, drink it?”

  “No, moron. We’ll hook her up to the embalming machine and give her the red tube in the you-know-where!”

  “Oh, Jesus, Luke. You sure that’ll work?”

  “Well, we gotta try something, haven’t we? Come on. Let’s roll.” Luke executed a sprightly kick in the weeds. “Squirrel!”

  “Ouch! Wait a minute, Luke. You going to put her up on the table in the preparation room? I don’t think she’ll like that much. Besides, you know, she might have company.”

  “I’ll work on that problem on the way home. You drive.”

  “What am I, a goddam chauffeur? See you don’t work on another baby, dad.”

  At two-thirty in the morning the black Chrysler edged to the curb in front of Di Carson’s house. The three, Jolly, Luke, and Babe Wooten, each noticed the battered pick-up truck standing in the driveway, but no one spoke of it. No lights shone from anywhere in the house, not from either story. If there was any life in the house (and likely there was) its porticoed face gave no hint of it.