The Accidentals Page 21

  When I landed a job at the Memphis Commercial Appeal and he stayed at Southwestern in his diligent effort not to graduate, we’d get together every week or so for pizza and beer. Then the night before he’s to report for duty I make the monster mistake of taking him out for a drink, a drink for the road, as in bon voyage, arrivederci, sayonara. So what does he do but start talking about tunnels. He’s heard they send the little guys down into the mud tunnels the Viet Cong build and booby-trap with mines. When one little guy gets blown up, they send in another to drag out what’s left of the first one, that is if the tunnel hasn’t collapsed on top of him. When Jim tells it, he starts to sweat. He is claustrophobic; he is scared of rats with hot pink eyes that glow in the dark; roaches and spiders give him the fantods. His eyes tear up and his glasses start to slip down on his nose. “Just a mud hole,” he says. “They make you crawl in like some kind of animal. It’s dark and there are things crawling around. What if I lose my glasses? What if I’m buried alive?”

  I don’t have the answers to those questions, so one drink leads to another. One minute we’re sipping our Seven and Sevens and grooving to “Light My Fire,” and the next thing I know we’re back at my place and he’s holding on to me like he’s in sniper fire and I’m the last tree in the jungle. So I open my branches and give him shelter, it was the only decent thing to do. After that, we pass out. I hardly remember it, except it was over like heat lightning and I was left sizzling.

  HE’S GONE AT the crack of dawn to report for duty. He leaves me a note saying how beautiful and sensitive I am and how he loves me and always has, which is why he hopes he doesn’t get killed so he can come back home and marry me. I am the only one for him. He will never forget last night.

  I throw the note in the trash, embarrassed by the whole thing. I’m a Mississippi girl with a neat bob who manages to talk herself into falling in love with somebody before I jump into bed with him. Plus: nothing has ever gotten my attention like practice-kissing with Hil.

  I drag myself off to the newspaper office at eleven the next morning. I don’t let myself think about tunnels and rats. I finish up a story on a reunion between an eighty-five-year-old black woman and her seventy-year-old daughter, who was born out of wedlock, the mother having been raped when she was fourteen by a gang of white boys, though she wouldn’t let me put that in the story, which was supposed to be an upbeat feature. She’d been sent to the store by her grandmother for a box of Tide. She was just walking through the woods on her way home when the boys jumped her. She told me she remembers how the box broke when she tried to fight them off with it. It snowed soap powder, she said, they were covered in white, it was pasted on their faces. She tried everything to get rid of the baby, including jumping out the window of a three-story schoolhouse and breaking her collarbone. When it was born, she refused to have it in the house. She threatened to strangle it. A girl, the baby was first taken to an orphanage and then, when she was older, taken for a worker by some white people in Minnesota who had a farm out in the middle of nowhere.

  It was her daughter’s son who had made the connection and then called the newspaper to try to find the mother. Turned out the mother didn’t much want to be found. When I interviewed her and the daughter the day before, I got the distinct impression that, now that they’d been thrown together by this busybody son/grandson and this busybody reporter, the mother and daughter didn’t much like each other, in fact were downright furious at each other. Between them was that little light-skinned child that the daughter thought the mother should have held on to and the mother looked at and saw soap flakes. During the interview the mother gazed at the floor and whapped her Japanese fan on her knee while her daughter talked on and on in a singsong monotone about how lonely she’d felt all these years, how hard her life had been. Then the mother looked up at her daughter and slapped her knee and began to laugh, like she’d just been told a good joke.

  What I know now is how there are always stories behind the stories people tell. They’re stacked like crackers in a box behind the ones they do tell. You could listen for the rest of your days and never get to the end of that box, never know the one true thing. This story I’m telling about Jim and me, it’s stacked on top of another story, the one about Grace and those boys and me telling on her and her little dead child; and then there’s the one behind that, of our own mother and why she did what she did, which is and will always be a mystery, and on and on, back to the beginning of time.

  But that morning, all the news about those two that was fit to print amounted to less than a page and I was on deadline, so we called it quits and they departed, hastily, the son/grandson holding the door for them both, mother first, then daughter. They moved quickly for women their age, careful not to touch each other on the way out.

  I wrote up the interview and headed out to get some Bufferin and a Coke. I popped three Bufferin into the bottle, my stomach doing bellyflops off the high board. The motion of the elevator made me break out in a sweat. (How did my sister manage to ride up and down cleaning one of those things every day of the week?) When I walked into the newsroom, Carl, who had the desk across from mine, said, “A skinny little guy with glasses was in here looking for you. He left you a note. Seemed all worked up.”

  I sat down at my desk and there was a typed note in the carriage of my typewriter. It said: Hi. I’m back. Pulled off bus and sent to eye doctor. Glasses lens too thick for gas mask. Call you later.

  SIX WEEKS LATER, the zombies on the screen are lurking and leering and reaching here, there, and everywhere. Jim is talking to Nurse Sally on the pay phone in the projection booth. When I see his shadowy form coming toward me across the blacktop of the drive-in parking lot without so much as a kernel of popcorn in either hand, I think maybe they’re out of popcorn; sometimes they run out of popcorn, it’s not unheard of. But then, as he opens the car door, I see the half smile on his face in the flicker of the picture and a giant zombie hand reaches down from the screen and snatches the heart right out of my chest. I want Jim dead in the rice paddies.

  I need to find somebody who will get rid of it but I have exactly seventy-six dollars and some change in the bank and know better than to ask Jim, who’s already acting fatherly; plus, the only people who do such things where I come from are chiropractors like the one who went to Parchment Penitentiary for butchering my mother. I’ve heard they use ordinary kitchen utensils like stirring spoons and tongs, sometimes coat hangers wrapped in duct tape, and just the idea of a man coming at my softest place with something like that in his hand makes me want to run for the hills. (Where’s Grace when I really need her? She’s around the world in Alexandria, Egypt, studying chicken scratches on papyrus. A graduate student with a big fat grant. I don’t even have a phone number.) A Lysol douche is supposed to work, but when I try it, lying in the cold bathtub, the first few drops set my insides on fire and I lose my nerve. The next day I drink a bottle of castor oil and promptly vomit it back up, almost asphyxiating myself. For half a day I consider suicide, picturing myself all laid out propped and pretty on my bed when they find me, but I haven’t a clue about a method that will produce an attractive and relaxed-looking dead person. I’d heard OD-ing on aspirin only half does it, turning you into a moron and forcing you to puke your brains out in the meantime. There’s also the unfortunate side effect of me being dead like Mama.

  SO, HERE WE are, on the way to New Orleans for a one-night honeymoon (ha!), courtesy of the Times-Picayune, whose editor called Jim the day after we found out about the baby and asked him to come interview to be a sports reporter. Footnote: I am the bona fide reporter, hardcore police beat and such, first woman in my paper’s history to work the news desk. No shrinking violet either. I’d covered the sanitation workers’ strike last year, getting gassed right along with the demonstrators. For that gig I wrote the straight news story and a sidebar, interviewing the widows of the two men who got crushed by an old garbage truck that malfunctioned. While King lay in a pool of blood outside the Lor
raine Motel, I was the first reporter to get to the one phone booth on Mulberry Street and dictate the story off the top of my head as I scraped away a piece of bubble gum on the glass with my fingernail. It was my first job out of college and I was immensely proud of myself for talking my way into it. But this is 1969; there are no pregnant women news reporters. There are no married women news reporters, except in the society section. Plus, you can’t interview someone and puke in their face at the same time. So I call my managing editor and tell him I’m married, and he says congratulations, he just wishes I’d given him more notice before quitting; he’d really gone out on a limb hiring me in the first place.

  I TURN AROUND and check the back seat. The dog opens her eyes and gazes at me wearily. The tips of her ears wobble with the motion of the car. That’s when I see it. Ears, almond eyes lined in black, a flare of white down the muzzle. She’s the spitting image of Laika, the little mutt they shot into space the day Dad took us to see the giraffes, the day our mother died. The Russians shaved her to attach the electrodes like she was a criminal about to be executed, then led her into a capsule the size of a rural mailbox and strapped her down. She was chosen out of forty others who’d been trained by being put in smaller and smaller cages to see how little wiggle room they could tolerate; she freaked out the least of all, sweetly yielding more and more space until she could barely turn around. She lasted only a revolution or two before she boiled in the hundred-and-twenty-degree heat.

  As I ponder little Laika’s miserable fate, my ankle starts to itch. I reach down to scratch and come up with the flea, which I squash and throw out the window.

  “Was that a flea?” Jim asks.

  “No,” I say.

  When Jim pulls the Ford into the motel parking lot and checks us in, I run into the room, to pee, of course, and do a bit of obligatory dry heaving. Then I rinse my mouth and call my only friend in the city to get the name of a vet who’d give the dog a flea-and-tick dip. I’d met Anne when my editor sent me down to cover an anti-Vietnam rally at Tulane and Loyola. Back then she was a photographer for AP. Now she has a husband and a set of triplets and sundry animals; she is accustomed to emergencies. She is thrilled I’ve gotten married. She thinks everybody should be married.

  “Girl or boy?” she asks as she looks up the vet’s number.

  The question throws me. Then I realize she’s talking about the dog.

  When I tell her, she asks what I’m going to name my “new little friend.”

  The question takes me aback. “I’m going to take her to the pound once I get her cleaned up, let them find her a home. The last thing we need right now is a dog.” I form the words I’m pregnant but they don’t come out. Where I come from, people say you’re expecting, as if it’s a package coming in the mail or the plumber. I shudder when I think of telling my poor father I’m expecting. What will he say? What are the odds? How many females in one family can get knocked up? We’re obviously fertile as turtles and reproductively challenged; in my case, this new thing called the pill being nearly impossible to come by if you’re a nice unmarried girl in Tennessee. Plus, who knew Jim was going to lose his starch and go all tunnelly on me? With Dad, I intend to bring up the marriage first, the other later, much much later. Then I will hold this baby in until I pop; I will set the world record for the longest pregnancy in the history of the planet.

  When I express my intention of taking this down-and-out mutt to the pound once I get her cleaned up, there’s a shocked silence on the other end of the line, then a rush of breath. “No, June,” Anne says ever so patiently, as if I’m one of the triplets. “You can’t take that poor baby girl to those dog killers. They’ll gas her. Do you know how many animals they euthanize every day? Do you know how those poor things suffer? It’s a holocaust. Plus, that dog will save your life one day.”

  I open my mouth to laugh and it comes out sounding like a hiccup. “Save my life! And for your information, she’s a mother, not a baby girl.”

  Anne says, “You mark my word, June; this is your lucky day.”

  When I make the call to the vet’s office, the receptionist says there are no appointments available until next week, so I tell her it’s an emergency. When she asks what’s wrong with my animal, I’m suddenly tongue-tied, recognizing that a pressing need for a flea-and-tick dip might not be considered an emergency by most people’s standards. The first thing that comes to mind is constipation, which is heavy on my mind because I myself am suffering acutely from it, one of the many unsavory aspects of being pregnant, I’m fast discovering. I’m peeing like a leaky faucet but wouldn’t have been able to have a decent bowel movement if a train ran over me.

  So I tell the receptionist we’ve just arrived in the City and this dog is experiencing severe constipation. How long? Four days’ worth, insofar as I can tell. Yes, she seems extremely uncomfortable and I do indeed consider this an emergency.

  When I get back into the Ford, the dog is sitting on the front seat behind the wheel as if she’s about to make off with the car. I slide her over and get in, whereupon I’m bit on the butt by something. I have on a skirt (all the better to pee in) and can feel the biter high-tailing it around to that area Frances used to call Between the Legs, where my underwear normally resided—Did you remember to wash Between the Legs? she would call out to Grace and me after Mama died and she took care of us before Dad ran her off. I head back into the motel room and pull up my skirt, noting in the dresser mirror that, for the first time in my life, there is a perky line of dark hair growing straight down from my navel into my pubic hair. I think, Great, what’s next—a beard? I bend over and ask Jim to check for fleas. He’s been following my strip act with interest, having never actually seen me naked, partly or otherwise, in broad daylight. He looks for a good long time.

  “Well, what do you see? It itches right here, right here.” I put my finger on the place.

  “Yeah, I see a welt right there, but no flea,” he says. “Maybe it hopped onto the floor.”

  I look down at the gold shag carpet and lose hope. I shake out my skirt and head back to the car. Behind the wheel the dog is panting. I realize suddenly I haven’t given her a drop of water since I picked her up hours ago. I run back into the room and get a plastic cup and fill it up. When I get back, she’s looking downright desperate. It’s at least a hundred degrees out there, and I’ve left the windows down only a little for fear she’ll jump out. I get in and roll them down a bit more and shove the cup of water at her. She leaps at it, sticking her long nose to the bottom to get every drop. I make a mental note to take better care of the poor thing and we head out for the vet’s.

  His office is at a tire-screeching intersection—motorcycles, trucks, cars, all honking and pushing on the gas. The exhaust stings my eyes. As I drive up, I realize I don’t have a leash. Sensing trouble, the dog tries to crawl under my feet as I brake. I drag her out and carry her inside the vet’s office, holding her away from my body. Her beignet ears are directing themselves sideways now so she looks like the Flying Nun. At the front desk they take one look and hustle us into an examining room. When the vet comes in, he looks me over like I’m the one with fleas. He says this is going to cost, this animal I’ve brought in is a mess. I ask if they have a payment plan and he says only for locals. I say okay, I’ll pay, and the vet’s assistant whisks her off. Ears back and down, she casts one last desperate look my way, her back legs bicycling for footing.

  I go around front and sit down in the waiting room, where I’m now allowed and where there are a bunch of prissy foo-foos in ribbons waiting for their toenail trims. The radio is on loud and everybody is all excited about the men getting geared up to walk on the moon. I check my arms and legs and find a tick settling in for the long haul in the crook of my elbow. I pull it off and slice it in half with my fingernail. When it squishes and blood squirts out, I feel the urge to puke, so I head for the bathroom and gag a while until the feeling passes. I’ve long since thrown up the saltines I managed to get down for bre
akfast. I come out and read a magazine article about Jackie Kennedy’s new life as a widow and get all choked up. My belly feels like it’s filling up with blood, as if I’m a tick. I am so hungry I’m salivating over a bowl of dog biscuits on the counter.

  I wait a good long time. Long enough to read three magazines from cover to cover, find out about how to make a Thanksgiving centerpiece and cook a turkey, how to build a sandbox for your little ones, how to updo your own French twist with four hairpins and a pick. When I get tired of reading, I entertain myself by imagining the people around me as having various types of tails, which has always been a favorite pastime of mine.

  There is an old woman sitting next to me holding on her lap a cage enclosing some form of animal life that’s curled into a tight ball. The woman has spread out a Life magazine on top of the cage. As she turns the pages, tears are rolling down her cheeks onto the magazine. She makes no effort to sop up the tears, just keeps turning pages; each one she looks at for several minutes. When she is called in, I take up the magazine she has put down. It’s the June 27 issue, and it has a boy named William C. Gearing Jr. on the cover, next to the headline “One Week’s Dead.” William Jr. is frowning into the camera as if the sun is in his eyes. His mouth is pursed. He has a broad nose and freckles. There is a lock of red hair across his forehead. William Jr. is twenty, three years younger than Jim. He is from Rochester, New York. I open the magazine and there they are: 242 of them marching across twelve pages. Crew-cut, lop-eared, snaggletoothed, newly dead boys. They sport an impressive assortment of hats. Helmets with numbers and chin straps, pointy cloth hats, square white hats with bills. Graduation caps, straw hats, what appears to be a fishing cap, an airman’s cap with goggles, a wide-brim that looks like it might belong to a Canadian Mountie. I wonder what kind of hat Jim might have worn, how it would have fit his forehead where the bone rides so close to the surface. These dead boys look uneasy, as if they’d strayed onto a movie set. Under the hats are the eyes, which, different as they are, seem to bear the same cast of light. They gaze at something just over my left shoulder but far out into space.