In Memory of Junior Read online

  Anyway, after the embalming, they were to deliver one back to the homeplace and leave the othern up there. With the circumstances like they are with the boys and all, I think where who wanted to be viewed had been planned out that way some time before. But with lightning striking twicet there would be, you know, hundreds of visitors. At least they were both in on the prearrangement plan, thank goodness.

  We had Mr. Glenn’s room for sitting since it was closest to the door. We aired it out—moved his bed out on the back porch. I bought a can of Pine Fresh. I told Faye that after all was said and done, her mama’s room did smell better than Mr. Glenn’s. I think she needed to know that. She said she appreciated it. I said I’d do it for anybody.

  Me and Harold thought a lot of Miss Laura.

  Nobody could get in touch with the boys, we thought, but then we figured out they had been notified, because Bert Talmadge said he’d seen them out at the graveyard with somebody—some old man, he said—checking out the burial plots. Mr. and Mrs. Bales have had a footstone already out there for a long time, so that won’t be no problem. It pays to think ahead. I was glad the boys were taking care of that.

  Faye got her a room at the Holiday Inn. Of course she couldn’t stay in the homeplace under the conditions. One of the most embarrassing things I have ever encountered was right before she left. I have never. It would have been okay if it had happened after she left, but no, it had to happen right before she left, while she was standing there. That bird. He whistled, then this is what he said. He said, “Git yo ass on the pot, Miss Laura.”

  Grove

  This was the place. Yes. I looked at my gravesite. It looked nice. There was green grass. The footstone. The big brass plate. “It meets my approval,” I said.

  I took a deep breath, relaxed. The boys were quiet. I looked around, over at the church. I remembered Anna’s eyes when she stood beside that wood post that was in the cabin that was . . . “Where did that cabin used to be? The church cabin. Wadn’t it right there under them trees?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tate. “It was torn down before I was born, I guess.”

  “You never saw the church cabin?” I asked him.

  “I think I remember it,” said Faison. “It was right there.”

  Tate’s boy was with us. Morgan.

  Bobbie, Four-Eyes, and Tina were on the road to Washington, D.C., for a week. Good riddance. Now I could settle everything here.

  I remembered the way Anna looked up at me—a kindness there in her eyes. Something I don’t remember seeing since then in anybody’s eyes, much less Tina’s, who’s been telling me for over a year now that I’ve lost my senses. I ain’t lost nothing, unless it’s my curveball.

  “It’s got kind of a view across that way,” said Tate.

  These boys have been good to me.

  “It looks like Don’s grave,” I said. “The grass around here. The way the grass is. Don Wheeler. Had the little dog I despised.” Good time for that story. “We were riding along in his station wagon with all his kids one time, mess of kids, and that little dog, a poodle, with some kind of bow around its neck, was in the back with the kids. Right after station wagons come out. Had the wooden sides. Real wood. Stuff would get eat out by termites, you know. Little son-of-a-bitch dog would always snap at me is why I didn’t like him. So I’m sitting up front with Don in the station wagon with all them noisy kids and so forth and so on and that dog in the back, and I want you to know that dog gets his collar hung over the back window handle, you know, to roll the window up and down with, and one of the kids screams, so I turn around and see what’s happening and try to get him unhooked and the little son of a bitch snaps at me. Bares his teeth and snaps at me, like a little ole rat. Well, I say, ‘Don, we’d better stop and get this dog off this handle back there,’ and he says, ‘What?’ Kids are so loud.”

  I needed to set down, so I did—on a little stone wall close by. Faison and Tate set with me. The boy set on the ground. Hippy-looking. “Why don’t you get your hair cut?” I asked him.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, one of them kids reaches over and grabs the dog, see, and can’t get him loose, and when the kid drops him back, when he drops him back he flips him over, somehow, so that the collar tightens a loop, and the dog’s eyes is popping out but he ain’t making no noise. So he gives a little jerk and goes limp and the kids start screaming, and I’m looking at all this see, so I say, ‘Don, I think you better pull over, your dog might be dead.’ I was hoping the dog was dead. So Don pulls over to the side of the road. And it’s raining, see. I manage to get the dog off the handle—it’s pretty easy now—and out the car and hand him to Don. The kids are all pressed up to the windows, and the rain is sprinkling down right steady, and Don is baldheaded, combs his hair up over the bald top, and all that hair is washed down over his ear, and his glasses are steamed up, and he’s standing there in the rain holding this dead dog. And he goes to hand me the dog and says—and here you got to know I once brought a bird dog back to life with mouth-to-mouth, actually it’s mouth-to-nose in the case of a dog . . . you know, whatever they call it. I had this reputation. So Don tries to hand me the dog and says, ‘Bring him back to life, Grove. You know how to do it.’ I don’t take the dog. The rain starts picking up. The dog is good and dead and wet by now and looks like a long limp skinny hot dog. I said, ‘You can do it as easy as I can.’ The kids are pressed up against the window and screaming and crying, their noses all mashed in against the glass. Don sees I ain’t gone do it. See, I’m glad the dog is dead.

  “So he gets the dog up in his arms and cradles him like a baby, you know, and tries to figure out how to do it. I said, ‘Just hold his mouth closed and puff through that little wet nose, then back off. Puff. Back off.’

  “And he did. Dog would puff all up, then go down. Puff all up, then go down. Right off, in oh, eight to ten seconds, the damn dog kicks, jerks, and there he is: good as ever, squirming around trying to get down. Worrisome little rascal. Don was right proud of hisself. Don’s funeral was the last I went to. So I’m saying this looks like Don Wheeler’s gravesite. Y’all ready to go? I appreciate you taking care of this. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. It’s just where I want to be.”

  We started back toward the car. Passed right by that Valentine tombstone. I looked at it for a minute—the one me and Anna used to sit up against. Then we started walking again.

  “Uncle Grove,” said Tate, “I’ve got something I want you to see.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “It’s a secret for now. It’s about thirty minutes outside town.”

  Faison spills the beans, says it’s a airplane. Tate gets mad at him.

  “Do what?” I said. You have to keep saying that so they think you can’t hear. Then when you don’t want to listen you can just sit.

  They fussed a little more. Turns out Tate’s got a Super Cruiser. That’s what I had. Nice little airplane. Got in my blood.

  I flew mine off a pole. That’s a long story. But a good one.

  We got in the car. The young one looked like he might be just right to help me out. Hell, he was probably used to hiding stuff from everybody. Smoking cigarettes. Hiding magazines. He’d be just right. Helping old Grove pull one over on them. I had to have some help from somewhere.

  When we got back to Tate’s apartment—I was going to stay with him the first night anyway—we hadn’t been there more than five minutes when the boys got the call that their daddy had finally died. And their stepmama. Poor old Glenn had been sick ten, twelve years.

  Faison

  This was unreal. Unreal. No way to have any idea who died first, as it was. I knew I had to act and act fast. Tate would sit on his ass. Faye would get to work with her fancy lawyer friends.

  The thing that had to be found out was who died first. The land was joint ownership so that whoever died first meant the other one got it. So I knew we had to find out who died first.

  You watc
h television, you know the way to find out when somebody died is with a autopsy.

  Of course the trick is—here’s the trick: I want to know who died first only if Ma Laura died first. See? Do you follow me? And if Daddy died first, I don’t want to know. You get my drift?

  The autopsies had to be done right away. I mean I can be sad later. I mean I am sad now, but I can be sad later, too. But you can’t figure out who died first in a week or two. They need to be more or less still warm, I think, and if I don’t find out right away, I’m thinking, then Miss Lawyer from Charlotte will be one up on me. She’ll figure out some way to “finalize” something. Have you ever listened to the way they talk? Lawyers?

  So I call Drew at the rescue squad. He more or less lives over there.

  “Drew, what do you have to do to get a autopsy done?”

  He tells me he’s sorry about everything, and that I can get one done on Daddy because I’m next of kin, but not on Ma Laura.

  Trouble. Right there.

  “Look, Drew, I don’t want Miss Laura’s daughter, my stepsister, to know about the autopsies—I mean I need both of them done to find out who died first.”

  “I don’t think you need a autopsy to find out when they died. You just examine the blood and then check out their core temperature. Something like that. But you’d need the daughter’s approval for Mrs. Bales. Next of kin and all.”

  “Is there any way I could get around the daughter? It’s real important, Drew.”

  “Well, yeah. Foul play. I mean foul play in their deaths. In that case the coroner would order autopsies and the medical examiner would do them, or have them done. Look, if you say I told you about all this, I’m denying it, okay? You need to understand that.”

  The plan bloomed beautiful in my head. I know the D.A., Gerald Smith. All I have to do is call him up and tell him I think the night sitter, one of the Blaine girls, murdered Daddy and Ma Laura in the night, but that she might not have, and I don’t want to embarrass anybody, so could he keep the investigation secret. That way they’ll have to do autopsies. But nobody would know. Then I can get Drew to find out which one of them died first. And with a little bit of luck, I’ll be the only one outside the police who ever finds out, because hell, that night sitter didn’t murder anybody, and then I can decide exactly how to release the information. It’s a beautiful plan, all aboveboard, I mean, legitimate. Hell, she could have murdered them. It’s possible. Anything’s possible.

  See, there was nothing to do but fight tooth and nail to hold on to the farm. It had all been screwed up since Mama left. If it wadn’t for that, then things would have happened orderly—me and Tate would have got the farm, sold it, and I’d be a millionaire.

  It sure as hell was not a good time for Uncle Grove to be around. I mean I was glad to see him, but he’s always had a way of getting in the middle of things.

  Grove

  They had to go tend to funeral arrangements and all that and that left just me and the boy in the apartment.

  Faison’s boy’s the one got killed in a car wreck. Tate’s boy was the one with me and he wanted to know if I was in the war. Said his school class was doing a project.

  I told him I missed out on all the military service, but I wore a uniform for a while. World War I. Kept me out of some trouble. That’s when I got started in the concession business—with fairs and the carnivals. I was in those wars. I had to shoot a fellow who was ripping up my tent with a knife one time. I told the boy about it. I yelled at this guy and he come at me and I shot him low, in the leg. Cost me sixteen dollars, doctor bill. Ah, boy.

  Moon was behind the clouds that night, then out, then behind the clouds, then out. I ran you know, and got rid of the gun under a little wood walkway. Then snuck back around to where the crowd was gathered—I have always said you hide in the action—and they got the guy up off the ground and the moon all of a sudden came out from behind a cloud and he says, “There he is. There’s the son of a bitch that shot me.” So they put me in the can, and next morning the man I shot told the sheriff to make me pay the hospital bill and let me go. Why, today I’d been sued for everything I own.

  “Yeah, and that’s where I met up with my sister—your grandmama,” I told him. “Up in them Kentucky mountains. It was about ten years after she left here. She’d seen my name in the newspaper—that I was in jail. She brought me some turnip greens, corn bread, country ham and biscuits, and preserves, and some cold buttermilk. She knew what I liked.”

  “My grandmother?” he says.

  “That’s right, your grandmother.”

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “Don’t have no idea.”

  This boy was wearing a damn earring. There’s no end to what they do nowadays. I told him a little bit about taking care of all that business about all that mess of his grandma’s. Then I told him it was all off the record, so to speak. To forget I’d said it. I ain’t ever been sure what all them boys know, what they don’t know about their mama.

  He wanted to know more, but I wouldn’t let on. I told him some about the rough country up in and around them Kentucky coal mines. And I told him all about my game wheel.

  I had fifteen, sixteen guys working for me, see. Some gambling stuff. I used to have a wheel with the pointer made like a snake, split in the very nose of it, with a little setscrew. And you take a piece of cigarette paper, newspaper, anything, put in there for the snake’s tongue, and make a little pointer-arrow, you know. And you spin it, run it round and round this way. Like spinning the hand on a clock except it was all of one piece with the tail and head on either side of center. There was thirty-six nails in this one, in a circle around the outside, where the numbers on a clock would be. We had thirty-six spaces. And there were twenty-four open and twelve starred, to win on—so you had two-to-one odds.

  And we’re in a town up there on Snake River. Coal mine in there. And I told the boy exactly what happened.

  “There was this guy up there had shot some guy a long time back in there on a carnival. And he walked up and wanted to know how the wheel worked. You pay a dime, turn it, and if it hits you win, so and so, and if it don’t hit you lose. The whole setup had three legs to it.”

  I spread out three fingers like a tripod to try to explain it. It ain’t easy to explain. I was trying to distract the boy a little from his granddaddy’s dying but it didn’t seem like he especially needed it. He was glued to the story.

  I explained the mechanics of the wheel—how I could lean against this hollow two-by-four with a rod up the middle and control that pointer. It was actually a thing of beauty. I told him I could stop that pointer on a gnat’s ass. I could, too.

  “But I tell you what I did,” I said. “I fired more than one guy for cheating old people. That’s one thing I did not allow. You could not work for me and cheat old people—or women with children, that sort of thing, you know. I fired more than one.

  “Anyway, this here fellow that come up, he got all stiff, and all blah, blah, blah, this, that, and the other, and I said, ‘Well I just explained the game to you. And if you like it, play it, and if you don’t,’ I said, ‘don’t give me no argument.’ I said, ‘I don’t care whether you play it or not.’

  “Well he played for five, ten minutes, turning it as hard as he could every time, taking up a lot of time for just a little money, so I said, ‘Listen, if you want to play some more it’s going to cost you twenty cents and if you win you win double. And so he pulled out twenty cents. And a pistol. Cussing. He said it better win, so and so. Course when he did that I just reached under the counter and pulled out that big old forty-five I had back then and I said, ‘I hope it does.’ I said, ‘If it does’ What I said—he said, ‘It better win, or else’—I said, ‘If it does I’m going to shoot you right between your eyes.’ And he turned just as white as a sheet, Morgan, just as white as a sheet, stuck his gun in his pants, and walked off. Left his twenty cents right there on the counter.”

  The boy was, you know, tak
en with the story, I could tell. Probably a good boy, under all that hippy stuff.

  He tried to tell me a little bit about computers. Then I just figured I might as well go ahead and tell him I needed some help on the little project I had to get done right away. He had his driver’s license and I didn’t figure those boys were going to want to help me, you know. Might be some resistance. So I told this one, Morgan, I’d pay him a hundred dollars to help me do something.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You don’t want to know what it is first?” I asked him.

  “Not especially. Either way.”

  “We might not be able to do it in one day. What it is, is this: I need to dig my grave and I need some help.”

  That backed him up a couple of steps.

  “Look here,” I said. Then I told him how I ain’t gone get hooked up on no tubes and all that with them foreign juices flowing in my body from no telling where, full of germs, little blip blip machines going off all over the place, people I don’t know from Adam coming in sticking their finger up my ass and all that. You think I’m gone let myself in for that? Why hell no, why should I get stuck dying for eight or ten years. You don’t really know how it is son, I told him.

  But, why hell, I remember when I was sixteen like it was yesterday. Time has a way. But I just up and decided that I’m the one that ought to say how long, not some army of so-called doctors and nurses so overbooked and overstocked and, and so money hungry you have to sit on some sofa in some waiting room for half a day so they can get somebody to come get you and sit you in some little back room for thirty minutes and you sit there on some little hard-ass table looking at certificates and then they come rushing in and look in your ear and rush out and then get some teenager to come in and write a bunch of crap down on a clipboard, so what I’m going to do in the next few days is dig my own damned grave. That’s one reason I’m in North Carolina. First things first. One thing at a time. I’m glad it’s about my time to go. This country I been seeing since it was most wilderness and I said to him, I said, “I tell you one thing, son. It’s going to hell. H-e-1-1. Hell in a breadbasket. Especially around here. I don’t even recognize any of it. Look around at them ugly glass mile-high ugly buildings all over the countryside. Look at that socalled—what is it?” I asked him, “That TechComm thing we drove by coming in here.”