You Want More Page 21

  It’s that kind of thinking that makes it almost amazing that I grew into being a pre-bouncer. If I’d taken my father seriously back in the sixties, I’d’ve ended up being something more secluded and self-centered, something like a bookkeeper, or a jockey.

  I said to the burly guy, “Hey, there’s two things that can happen here: either you can learn to understand that love is blind, or I can get Sparky to come over here with his eight remaining fingers and blind you himself, so you don’t have to live with seeing interracial dating in your midst. Comprende, amigo?”

  I pointed at Sparky. Without his thumbs it looks like he could use his fists as skewers. The truck driver looked over at Sparky, back to me, then to the white guy and black girl. He said, “Well, okay then,” just like that. I stood my ground and tried not to shake. The little voice in my head kept thanking the Cartwrights over and over.

  So I put the tape in the VCR, and I set the station and time, and drove off to the Treehouse. The bar doesn’t open until noon, but I got there at eleven in order to help Frank clean up from the night before and to set out our specials in the plastic stand-up signs for each table. Frank said, “How goes it, Ricky?”

  I said, “Okay, I guess. You?”

  Frank said, “Uh-huh. Fine.” He said, “You know, we didn’t really get to talk last night. I mean, I heard you say that you still didn’t know if you’d have a little boy or a girl, but what else did the doctor say?”

  I wiped off a table. Friday night had been pretty slow at the Treehouse. Down the road there’d been a yearly festival with a battle of the bands and a tractor pull. I said, “He didn’t say much. He asked if she’d been taking care of herself, whether she’d quit drinking and smoking. She said she had, which is true—and, goddamn, it ain’t fun around the house, by the way. And then he said he thought her delivery date might need to be changed about a week early. Not much else went on. He dabbed some goo on her big stomach and we saw this little crooked Vienna sausage-looking thing on the television screen. Then he gave us the tape.”

  Well, no, I said, “The tape!”

  I didn’t say goodbye to Frank. I didn’t tell him I’d be right back. I just left the Treehouse, got in my car, and drove fifteen minutes back to my house.

  It was too late. Right over the image of my as-yet-sexless child, the floating little thumb-sucking thing inside Jessie’s body, Hoss now talked to Little Joe about how skittish the horses seemed to be all of a sudden.

  SPARKY SAID, “WELL, it could be worse, Ricky. At least she still has the baby. One time when I was working Amtrak, this woman came screaming out of the bathroom saying she’d miscarried in the toilet. We were flying down the track about sixty miles an hour, you know. I had my break and was eating an egg salad sandwich in the dining car. I remember all this ’cause I had a mouthful of egg in my mouth when this woman made the announcement.”

  I nodded my head and shoulders quickly, trying to get Sparky to finish the story. I needed to make some phone calls, or talk to some of the customers.

  Sparky said, “She came running out of that bathroom saying the thing came out of her, she thought, but she wasn’t sure. On a train, you know, it goes straight down to the track, and at sixty miles an hour you don’t have time to exactly check what came out in the bowl underneath you. One time I had a kidney stone and I was supposed to be pissing into a strainer, but I kept forgetting. So I have a stone in between the tracks somewhere from Lexington to Danville.”

  I nodded hard, waving my right hand like a paddlewheel for Sparky to finish up. A group of four women came into the Treehouse, all of them in their mid-thirties. I needed to find a way to talk to them.

  “This woman on the train—her name ended up being Brenda—had a nervous breakdown right there and then. She fainted. Two men who were afraid of airplanes and traveled on business trips up to New York all the time got up and grabbed her, checked her heartbeat and breathing, and put a pillow behind her head. I said, ‘Damn, you don’t see this everyday on an Amtrak train, do you?’ Well, as it ended up, we took her off the train at the next stop and sent her to the local hospital. That would be Gaffney—we were doing the run down to New Orleans—and then on our way back up she waited there at the station for me. She got on board and said, ‘I want you to tell me exactly where we were when I miscarried. I want you to take me to the spot so I can give my baby a proper burial.’ I told her that by this time—a couple days had gone by—surely her miscarriage was gone. But she got on board the train and took it up to Charlotte, and then we got out and started walking back south on the tracks. My boss said I had to do it, and that I’d probably get a raise for the whole thing.”

  Two more women walked into the bar. I waved my arm faster for Sparky to get to the moral of the story.

  “We found about twenty turtle shells,” said Sparky. “You would not believe how many turtles get stuck in between the tracks, especially snapping turtles when you’re near a lake or in the swamps. We found turtle shells, and that was it. I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to be looking for. And if I did run across anything that looked like a baby, I didn’t want to see it, or point it out to Brenda. So as it ended up, after I finally convinced her that we’d gone past the spot where she miscarried, she walked over into the woods and got some sticks. She borrowed my shoelaces and fashioned a small wooden cross, stuck it a few feet from the track, and said she felt better. And an hour later this gandy dancer came from the station to pick us up to get us back to the station. I wonder whatever happened to old Brenda?” Sparky asked, like I’d know.

  He walked off with his hands in his pockets, straight down like trowels were attached to the ends of his arms. I lost all pride and any bashfulness whatsoever and started asking women if they had any of their sonogram videotapes around their houses.

  I offered a hundred dollars to buy one of them.

  TERESA SMILEY SAID she’d be right back. Teresa Smiley said she kept hers on her bookshelf, stuck between a 12-Step program book and a Stephen King novel. Since her husband had gotten custody of their little boy, she got depressed thinking about it, but said, “A hundred dollars! Hell, I won’t sell for less than three hundred.”

  It was one of those occasions when I didn’t have time to check out the going rate for sonograms on the black market. So I said, “One fifty.” I said, “Lookit, unless you had your sonogram on Thursday, there’s going to be a different date down there on the screen. I mean, I’m going to have to go to great lengths of finding out a way to forge the video.”

  Teresa Smiley stared hard at me, then sat back down at her table, a table filled with women who worked third shift at the mill. Teresa said, “The memory of a child is worth more than a hundred and fifty dollars, Ricky. And your wife won’t even notice the wrong date down there. We women are interested in the baby, not the time of day. I’m insulted, and I think you should be really ashamed.”

  “A minute ago,” I said, “you were saying how you got depressed even knowing the tape was around. Come on, Teresa, you don’t know how much I need this tape.” I told her my story, but didn’t explain about Bonanza over the image of my baby. I told her it was professional wrestling, so she could understand why I might be a little distraught about having to work on Saturday in the first place.

  Teresa said, “Two fifty,” I said, “Two,” and she left to get the tape. I didn’t even ask her if her child, too, was turned away from the camera, and if it wasn’t turned away, was it real obvious as to the sex of the child. When I saw ours, I wasn’t even sure where was the head and where was the tail. To me, Jessie’s sonogram looked like a picture of an ulcer or something on her stomach wall. I couldn’t make out a meaning whatsoever. I didn’t have that art background that Jessie could boast about.

  Sparky came over to me a few minutes after Teresa left and said, “You might have some trouble coming at you, but I’ll be there for you.”

  I said, “What do you mean?” The worst thing that could happen, I thought, was for Jessie’s meeting
to be canceled and her coming to the Treehouse to spend the day.

  Sparky said, “What I’m trying to tell you is, don’t turn around immediately, but there’s a guy down at the end of the bar staring a hole through you. It’s Teresa’s ex.”

  I didn’t turn at all. I could feel the guy staring straight into my brain. The Treehouse had its regulars who came in every day—house painters, self-employed body shop men, the disabled, people who only really worked on Wednesday mornings over at the flea market—but there were people who came in haphazardly, maybe once a month, to sit by themselves and get over whatever it was that stuck in their craw. I never had to pre-bounce any of those people. First, it wouldn’t matter—if they wanted to fight they’d fight no matter what I had to say. Second, most of them were so consumed with whatever bothered them, they didn’t have the energy to actually get off the barstool and start a fight, though they’d probably like to see one.

  I said to Sparky, “The one who got custody? Are you talking about Teresa’s husband who ended up with the kid?”

  He said, “That’s the one. Name’s Ted, but everyone calls him Slam. He won the state wrist wrestling championship four years in a row, and the Southeast tournament twice.”

  I said, “Goddamn it.” I thought, If only I’d taken the time to look at the videotape before I threw it in to tape Bonanza. I thought, If only the baby had turned around so we’d know the sex of it. I thought, If only Jessie hadn’t gotten the appointment on Thursday, and almost caught myself thinking, If only I’d put on a rubber that night.

  Sparky said, “I arm wrestled him one time, but it’s hard for me to get a grip, what without a thumb. Hell, it was hard for him, too. I kept sliding right through his hand.”

  “Shut up, Sparky,” I said, and walked straight over to Slam. I said, “Your ex-wife’s about to save my life, man. I screwed up and taped over my child-to-be’s videotape inside the womb, and Teresa’s going to get y’all’s so I can make a tape of it.” I said, “My name’s Ricky.”

  Slam said, “Wife.”

  I said, “Excuse me?” He didn’t look my way. He seemed to keep staring at where I stood talking to Sparky.

  “Not ex-wife. Wife. Just like a piece of paper can’t make a marriage, a piece of paper can’t end one, neither,” said Slam.

  I said, “Are you Catholic?”

  This is no lie. Slam said, “I’m an American and it’s the American way of being.”

  I said, “Oh. Well, then your wife is about to save my skin.”

  Tape the tape, I thought. I thought, You should’ve asked her to tape the tape. I mean, there wasn’t a reason for me to pay so much to more or less swipe hers. I tried to think of a way of getting to her before she even got inside the Treehouse so we could at least renegotiate.

  Slam said, “What?” He held his beer in a way I’d not seen before, a half-inch from his face and a quarter-inch to the right. At first I thought he used the can as a mirror to check out someone who walked up behind him. Being a pre-bouncer, I notice things like that.

  I said, “Your wife’s saving my ass.”

  There’s this look that only certain people can give. There’s this look some people can give that’s somewhere between smoke in their eyes and hand grenades in their pockets. Slam had that look. I turned my head toward Sparky but he’d already started punching a guy named Hull who came in drunk and wanted a piece of another guy named Dayton for not painting his house evenly earlier in the summer.

  Slam said, “Well, I guess that’s better than humping your ass, Bo.” He said, “Glad to hear it,” grabbed his beer, and left the bar, either unaware of the law, or unconcerned about the police that regularly parked across the street.

  Sparky came over and said, “You got a way with words, Ricky. Whatever it is you said, you did it, man.”

  I sat down on the barstool next to Slam’s and concentrated so as not to actually pee in my pants like in the cartoons.

  AS SOON AS Jessie had taken that one-minute-and-you-know-if-you’ve-really-missed-your-period test in the bathroom, she pulled a Walkman out of the bedroom closet, put in new batteries, and slipped a tape of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the cassette holder. She pulled the earpieces of the headset as far apart as possible, strapped them around her sides, and put the volume on full blast. Jessie said, “We’re going to have a baby, Ricky.”

  I’d just been watching her from the other side of the room.

  I didn’t even know about the bathroom test. I sat there on the side of the room reading my thesaurus. “A baby?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  She said, “I have this theory. I believe that if you play music inside the womb, the fetus absorbs it and when the baby comes out, instead of crying and screaming, it’ll make noises similar to an orchestra.”

  I said, “What?”

  She said, “The reason why a baby always wails is because it absorbs the noises of the outside world for nine months. In the city it hears horns honking, people screaming, the conglomeration of people’s conversations all going into one big drone, dogs barking, cats crying out in the night, the hiss of a teapot.”

  She had a list of every possible noise, it seemed. She finally finished her dictum with, “So if I keep playing classical music, when the baby’s in pain or wants a bottle, we’ll be serenaded with French horns and oboes, and violins. Bassoons!” She said, “Bassoons! And piccolos and flutes and cellos.”

  Hell, to me it didn’t sound like all that bad a theory. I mean, it’s logically possible. I said, “Why don’t you order some of those books on tape, and then at night the baby can tell us stories.”

  Jessie put another Walkman on her own ears and left the room. She kind of left the room a lot during her pregnancy, for that matter. I’m not sure why. I’ve always tried to be sensitive to her needs.

  TED, OR SLAM, whatever, kept standing outside the Treehouse. He was waiting for his ex-wife Teresa, I knew. Just about the time I started to go outside to tell him I wouldn’t make a tape of his pre-born child, she tapped me on the shoulder. Like every intelligent woman with a lunatic ex-husband in her life, she sensed danger. She parked the Buick a few blocks away and took the back entrance. I said, “Ted’s here.”

  She looked around. She said, “Ted was in here earlier but I don’t see him now.”

  I said, “Out front.”

  “Oh. Well. Good,” she said. “That’ll be two hundred dollars up front, no check.”

  I only had a check. I said, “Hey look, I got this better idea. Why don’t we find another VCR, and do a tape-to-tape so you don’t have to lose yours totally. I mean, someday you might want it back.” I kind of saw a big confrontation ahead, like when birth mothers arrange for adoptive parents, then change their minds in the delivery room.

  Teresa said, “I won’t change my mind, believe you me. I’ve had it. I want a new life, Bubba. As a matter of fact, I’ve already contacted the paper to advertise a yard sale for next weekend. I’m getting rid of my old high school yearbooks, too.”

  I said, “Well, okay.” It was nearly three o’clock and I couldn’t take the chance of Jessie getting a ride home from the synagogue with one of her friends, slipping in her tape, and fainting when she came to believe that her baby had suddenly gained a clear and distinct shape and form which looked like Hoss. I said, “Hold on a second.”

  I bought Teresa a drink on my monthly tab and walked over to where Sparky stood in the corner of the bar, scanning the slim crowd. “Sparky,” I said, “look, do you have one of those teller cards by any chance? I lost mine in the machine—not ’cause I didn’t have any money—because the back strip got dirty or something and it’s Saturday and the bank’s closed and I need two hundred bucks right now to buy the tape. I can give you a check today, or if you wait until Monday morning I can go over to the bank and get cash for you.”

  Sparky said, “I hope you remember this when you go and name your child.”

  I said, “I can’t name my kid Sparky.”

  Sparky said
, “I wouldn’t expect you to.” He reached into the wallet he kept chained to his belt loop and pulled out two hundred one-dollar bills. He said, “My given name’s Earl. Earl for a boy, Earline for a girl.”

  I don’t know why I said okay, but I did. I figured if I could get Sparky drunk later on in the evening, maybe he’d forget the promise.

  “Here you go,” I said to Teresa. She handed me the tape. She handed me her own personal sonogram videotape of the only child she’d ever had and said, “I hope I picked up the right one. Slam and me did some amateur strip stuff one night, but we never sent it off to any of those programs on cable.”

  I asked Sparky to cover for me, told him to use the word “discretionary” or “castigatory” should a fight seem eminent, and I took the back door out, too.

  THERE IS A supreme being. Someone powerful exists, or at least existed for me that afternoon. I pulled out my tape filled with Bonanza, plus a half-hour special on the NASCAR season at the halfway point, and pushed Teresa’s baby’s video in my machine. It didn’t need rewinding. I wondered if she’d ever really watched it.

  It wasn’t her strip show. Right there on the screen, in brilliant shades of gray, was a form. I couldn’t make out eyes or genitals. There was no way possible Jessie could see the difference between her womb and that of a woman who grew up and lived in a mobile home.

  I felt good about living in America.

  The Supreme Being stayed on my side, ’cause while the tape still played, in walked Jessie, home from what ended up being a committee meeting of a group called Sisters of Bashemath, Ishmael’s Daughter. She said, “I thought you had to work.”

  I moved closer to the television screen, down on the carpet, and held my forearm parallel to the date and time logo down at the bottom. I said, “I went and got things going, but I started feeling a little nauseated.”