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  Madame Tammy wasn’t embarrassed about working flea markets, either. She knew that most people—especially wives—thought she said things like, “For twenty dollars I can tell you that you’ll get your next blow job in five minutes.” In reality, perhaps it was better than her real modus operandi, namely finding answers about family, commitment, and medical history, among other things. Madame Tammy heard adults walk past her table at various Southeastern markets, not able to whisper, “Whore,” or, “Nutcase,” or, “Gypsy.”

  “If you come up here for a week then you better bring something to sell,” Tammy told Lamar. “I’m not going to put up with another free-loading man who wants to spend time in my Tower while I work my tail off holding fat, callused hands in the heat and humidity. All the while I tell goners they got a happy long life ahead of them.”

  Lamar said, “We haven’t seen each other since you moved up there for good, Sis.”

  Tammy looked out her front window. In the winter, sometimes, she swore she saw the Atlantic Ocean, some four hundred miles away. “Why aren’t you teaching? Shouldn’t school be starting down there by now? I lost my boy who used to look around for me.”

  The mechanical operator came on and said, “You have one minute.”

  Lamar said, “Parents in Montgomery, Alabama, don’t have much sense of humor. There aren’t any students left in all of America who understand sarcasm or irony, either.”

  The telephone beeped a series. Tammy said, “Well come on, then. If I’m not here, then I’ll leave a note where you can get me. The door’ll be unlocked.”

  She heard no answer from Lamar, realized that she’d spoken to dead air, and hung up. Tammy waited ten minutes for the phone to ring—long enough for Lamar to go buy another phone card from Opelika, Alabama—it didn’t, and she went out the door. She carried two pictures with her that needed refurbishing. One photo showed her mother and father together, in front of a DeSoto. Her mother wore a regular cotton dress with some kind of pattern on it. Her father wore suspenders and had his hair slicked back in a way that heightened the receding hairline.

  The other photograph was a black-and-white close-up of her father’s palm, and the scar that ran from the meat of his thumb to between his index and middle fingers. Initially it was supposed to be used as evidence in some court case involving an inferior and spastic spinning frame in the FortyFive Cotton Mill where Shorty worked, later as some kind of documentation for workman’s comp. Tammy’s father left town before he could find a lawyer to help him out. He left after shooting a wealthy man in the groin, at a public golf course, probably on purpose.

  The details didn’t matter. Tammy and her brother got out of Forty-Five. After college, and after two misguided husbands, Tammy decided to find her father, and not because of every other human being on one of the afternoon talk shows. She would know him by his scars, only. She read a book on the finer points of palmistry, and rented five-dollar flea-market tables soon thereafter. When a desperate client had a malformed series of lines, Tammy made up only good news, smiled, and told the person he or she had nothing to worry about whatsoever.

  She had made up good news for her brother, too, when he took a job teaching tenth-grade geometry in Montgomery. And though she didn’t truly believe in her own fake psychic abilities, Madame Tammy knew she would have to lie to Lamar again. Then there would be the problem of offering the truth, too.

  “SEEMS TO ME Jesus of Nazareth could’ve done better than turning water into wine. Seems He could’ve done something a little more spectacular, for a miracle. Rock into wine, maybe. Poison ivy into wine. Hell, why didn’t He turn Satan into wine?—all your people say that booze is the devil’s doing in the first place.” These are the words that got Madame Tammy’s brother, Lamar, fired from teaching tenth-grade geometry in Alabama.

  “I don’t understand why you’d bring religion up in a math class,” Tammy said to her brother. He’d not had time to even bring in his couple suitcases or the boxes in the back of his car. Lamar didn’t arrive until three days after calling from northern Alabama. Because he couldn’t think of anything else, he spent nights diving into country club golf course water hazards and collecting golf balls to have something to sell at the flea markets next to his sister.

  “Beats me, too,” Lamar said. “I’ll tell you this: the parents didn’t understand, obviously, and down there no one thinks to ever have a respectable hearing, trial, or closeddoor conference. I said that shit about Jesus on a Friday afternoon, and the principal and district superintendent came to oversee me pack up my classroom on Saturday morning.”

  “Like father, like son, as they say.”

  Lamar reached in his pocket and pulled out a hip flask. “You can do better than that, Tam,” he said. “All that goddamn comparative-lit education you got, you can come up with something better than a cliché.” He laughed, took a swig, and handed the flask over.

  Tammy shook her head no. “Okay. Where the salmon spawn and die, there the next generation spawn and die. Whatever. Listen, you can either sleep on this couch, or on the floor, or in the hammock outside. You can stay a month. Then you have to go back home. That’s the law around here. I read it somewhere. No one can stay with his or her grown sibling for more than a month.”

  Lamar said, “I didn’t come to get lectured. And I have enough money to move, once I get my retirement. They’ll hold it somewhere between thirty and ninety days. I don’t have to wait until I’m sixty-five or anything like in some of the backwards, unrelenting, selfish states. I don’t want to be a burden. I just needed to get out. I’ll tell you later.”

  Madame Tammy said, “I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with one of your students, Lamar.”

  “I thought you were some kind of psychic. Shouldn’t you know?” He drank from the flask. “I’m only kidding. It’s Fermat’s Last Theorem. Some pinhead figured it out, so there’s no more reason to live in mathematics, as far as I’m concerned. Computers, too—there’s no need to stand in front of a chalkboard. Some people think the universe is governed by mathematics and whatnot. When I said all that stuff about Jesus in class, it was my way of being mathematical. Just like when I talked about the closest distance between two points, I was being religious. Fuck it.”

  Lamar brought up his clothes. He took his sister down the mountain to eat at a family-operated pool hall/bar/pizza joint called Shots and Slices. Right after Tammy beat him in their first game of nine-ball Lamar said, “I guess living up here kind of insulates you from undergoing another bad marriage.”

  Tammy said, “I like these people. It’s also a central point for flea markets between mid-Florida and northern Virginia. I made a big mistake going out to New Mexico one time, lost my mind, and came back. Don’t give me shit, especially after all you’ve done.”

  Lamar re-racked the balls while Tammy went to order a large, odd pizza—anchovies and pineapple. Lamar looked at the walls, pictures of people standing in front of wooden tables, everything from milk glass to measuring devices in front of them. When Tammy came back he said, “I know it’s your business and all, but instead of reading palms why don’t you take some notes and write some kind of scholarly work about it. Why don’t you write something with an anthropological slant? I bet it’d sell. I don’t know. Give it some kind of racy title. Call it Hand Jobs in America or something.”

  Tammy broke, and the nine ball swerved into a side pocket. “You owe everyone in here a drink. That’s the house rules. Listen, I only want to find our daddy one last time. It’s not so much that I feel unwhole because he left us early on. I can’t explain it.”

  “What’ll you do if you find him?”

  “Shoot him twice,” Tammy said. “I’ll have a scotch and Dr Pepper. Don’t make fun of me or I’ll tell you the truth about your love line.”

  TAMMY’S LOCAL FRIEND Fagen placed two quarters on the table. He said, “Are y’all’ses playing for fun or money or both or neither?” Fagen wore a coonskin hat without the tail. He kept a knife att
ached to his belt.

  Tammy said, “Hey, there, Clarence Fagen. How you doing today?” She slipped up on the pool table and let her legs dangle.

  Fagen smiled halfway. “Same old same old. Man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Can’t complain.”

  Tammy pointed at Lamar and said, “This here’s my brother the mathematician. Or the ex-mathematician. He ain’t quite the same as us. To him, six hours equals six hours.”

  Lamar didn’t know what that meant. He stuck out his hand to Fagen and said, “I’m Lamar. Good to meet you.”

  Fagen said, “Fagen.” He nodded. “Say. If you’re a mathematician then I guess you know that one-hundred-to-one odds is pretty good. I’ll bet you a thousand dollars to your ten that you’ll have to pee before I do. You think on it.” Fagen turned to Madame Tammy and said, “Any luck with your daddy’s hand, finding it?”

  Lamar didn’t like his sister’s choice of lifestyle, friends, or secrecy. Tammy said, “Don’t bet him, Lamar. Fagen wears a drainage bag and pees down his leg all the time into the thing. He acts like he never has to pee.”

  Lamar thought this: x times y equals xy. He thought, 3.14159265, but could go no further.

  Fagen said, “Damn,” and took his two quarters off the table. “If you going to be that way, then I don’t want to play no more.”

  “Fagen sells pelts,” Tammy said to Lamar. “He sells pelts and keeps an eye out for his daughter. She’d be about what, now, Fagen—eighteen?”

  “Eighteen going on nineteen. Unless she’s exactly like her momma. Then she’d be eighteen going on either three or sixty-five, depending on her mood.”

  “Fagen’s wife took off with their daughter ten years ago. The mother had a thing for fur coats, and Fagen here figures, like mother, like daughter. He thinks he’ll eventually find her wanting to buy ten or twelve rabbit skins to sew together into something.”

  Lamar said, “Huh.” He rolled the cue ball down to the other end of the table, but not hard enough for it to return. A song came out of the jukebox that sounded like the soundtrack to a foreign wedding—Italian, Jewish, or Greek—which caused a couple boys to pull out their quarters and get the thing back to country music.

  Fagen’s eyes rolled back somewhat. Lamar figured the guy was pissing into his bag. “The last thing I heard my wife say was that she wanted to find a man who could set her down on a mink couch, drive her around in a car with sheepskin seats.”

  Lamar said, “Logic’s a tricky thing, but I think you’re going about it right. My own dad had a love for selling golf balls at the flea market, and I imagine that Tammy here will find him doing the same one day. It makes sense that you’ll find either your ex-wife or daughter looking for cheap fur. Shit, I remember when I was a kid, my father would take me out at midnight and we’d dive into golf course lakes. I’d scoop out balls with my forearms, and then later on he’d clean them up in Clorox. Then we’d set up a table at the local flea market on Saturday mornings with some kind of dirty sign, something like ‘Look at These Scarless Balls,’ or, ‘Our Balls Still Have Bounce.’ It wasn’t the best time in my life, but I guess it made me who I am today. Tammy didn’t have to put up with all that back then.”

  Fagen drank his beer. He placed the bottle down on a fold-out wooden chair. “The sign said, OUR USED BALLS STILL HAVE DIMPLES. I been knowing your sister now six years. She told me. If I was you, I’d get over it. Seems to me your sister has more bruises than you do about your daddy taking off. You want to help her out, take some balls to the tables and sell them a dollar a dozen. Sooner or later your daddy’ll come up to buy you out so’s he ain’t got competition.”

  “Come on now, Fagen,” Tammy said. “We’re out having fun.” She racked the balls for a regular game of eight-ball.

  Lamar said, “I’m not judging anybody, man.”

  Fagen said, “You right. I’m sorry.” He turned around to select a cue stick. The back of his belt was one of that kind with a name branded into it. His said “LEONARD.”

  Lamar chalked his cue and raised his eyebrows to Tammy. “I started a tab up there. If you want another scotch and Dr Pepper just go put one on it.”

  Fagen turned around and looked down his stick for warp. He said, “What do you think the chances are that someone could break, and then all the balls came right back to where they once were? I’m talking, what are the chances that a man could knock hell out of the balls, have them scatter and ricochet all over the table, then land right back where they were racked, in the same order?”

  Lamar said, “Not very good.”

  Fagen said, “I didn’t think so.” He broke. The two ball went in. Fagen said, “I guess it wasn’t meant for me to do it a third time.”

  “WHEN WE’RE NOT sitting behind flea-market tables looking everybody in the face—or in your sister’s case, on the hand—then we’re at bars. When we’re not in bars, we’re at diners—Waffle Houses, Huddle Houses, American Waffles. When we’re not eating or drinking, we’re watching afternoon shows on TV. The people we’re looking for don’t go to movie theaters; they go to drive-ins. They don’t go down to Atlanta to watch the Braves play; they sit in the front rows of professional wrestling.” Fagen kept looking at the side pocket.

  Lamar said, “Hey, how come you got LEONARD written on the back of your belt?”

  “When we’re not in bars, diners, drive-ins, or wrestling matches, we tend to drive up and down roads looking for people with car trouble. And I’m not talking about the interstates. The people we’re looking for always take back roads, secondary roads. You ever looked at a Rand McNally and seen those little vacant lines where roads are going to be? That’s where my daughter is now. That’s where your father is. I’d almost bet that your father is with my daughter. I ought to kill you right now, just for mentioning it.”

  Fagen shot. The cue ball bounced around and knocked in the seven. He hadn’t called anything beforehand. “Bought it cheap from a man down on his luck,” Fagen said. “Didn’t buy it from a man named Leonard, though. Bought it from a man named Eugene. Eugene got it from a man named Horace. Horace got it from Leonard in some kind of bar fight, I don’t know. Horace had a lot of belts he sold to Eugene. He had one that said ‘Cassius Clay.’ Eugene promised that Horace used to be a real contender, in a way.”

  Lamar thought, Maurice Fréchet came up with the idea of metric space in the year 1906. He thought, The tree roots of mathematics are algebra, plane geometry, trig, analytic geometry, and irrational numbers. The capital of Alabama is Montgomery. “I bet that might be worth something. Cassius Clay. I’ll be damned.”

  Tammy came back with a round for everyone. She said, “Y’all didn’t wait for me? We could’ve played cutthroat, the three of us.”

  With his eyes Lamar said, “We are.”

  “I met a man one time said he fought Rocky Graziano. Not Rocky Marciano. Graziano. Said he fought him when Graziano was finished, after he’d quit fighting professional. They got in some kind of altercation in a bar, like men do. This old boy had a scar on his face shaped like an arrowhead. I believed him. Graziano had a way to twist his boxing glove twice on the skin before anyone knew what hit. He was one of them people who could pull out your heart while it still beat, I bet.” Fagen shot hard into the far bank, hitting nothing. “Take over, Tammy. A couple boys just come in thinking they got good kidneys.” He handed her his cue.

  Fagen stared down Lamar, then winked. Lamar noticed the arrowhead-shaped scar beneath Fagen’s left eye. “ls everyone in the flea market business a scam artist? This is like a foreign film. Goddamn, I feel like subtitles might be lined up at the bottom of my frame,” Lamar said.

  “Your food’s ready, Tammy,” someone yelled out from the other room.

  Tammy placed her stick on the table. She looked at her watch. “We better take this to-go. It’s late. We have to get up at four to get good tables next to each other down in Pickens.”

  Lamar said, “That’s no problem. Sometimes I wake up at three and find mys
elf going over square roots.”

  Lamar slept on the floor. When the telephone rang an hour into his sleep—when there was a pause before some child asked him if he was God—he said, “What’s with you people? Tell your mother to find a reason to live, outside bothering me at all hours of the day and night.” He couldn’t fathom how they followed his trail all the way from Montgomery.

  The child said, “This is Eddie. I’m calling my momma.” Lamar sat up and reached for his cigarettes. “This is Eddie. Aunt JoJo said Momma lived here. Are you Jesus?”

  Lamar stood up. He said, “This isn’t funny anymore, kid,” and hung up.

  TAMMY TOOK A bottle of vodka down from the shelf and poured it into three flasks. She shook a halfgallon of orange juice, then poured it into a Coleman camping thermos.

  She stretched her fingers back and forth.

  Lamar rolled over on the floor, five feet away from the refrigerator. “I had the worst dream of my life. I must’ve woke up every five minutes. I know where our father is. He’s in a telephone booth somewhere fucking with us. That’s what I dreamt.”

  Tammy said, “We need to leave in about twenty minutes. If you want to sell golf balls you might want to take a shower. If you want to mill around with people, don’t bother. It’s going to be hot today.”

  “Somebody called up last night and messed with me. You can find anybody’s movements on the Internet these days. They found me. All my parents down in Montgomery found me. They called and kept asking if I was God or Jesus. You don’t have some kind of weird one-nine-hundred number do you? You don’t have some kind of sex number where you talk dirty to women and say you’re God, do you?”

  Tammy put down the thermos. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I forgot.” Lamar did two sit-ups and got up. “I met this woman at the store.” She went to the phone and hit star sixty-nine.

  Tammy memorized the number, called back, and got an answering machine. It was four o’clock in the morning. Aunt Jojo’s voice said, “Way to go. You better plain find Special Eddie’s momma so she can leave a message for her little girl.”