You Want More Page 7

  “That was a fine casserole you baked,” one of the sons said. “We appreciate the food you cooked, ma’am.”

  Tina stared at her husband. She said, “What?”

  “I gave them your kidney pie,” G. R. said. “They were hungry. I couldn’t let them live off of Skittles and Snickers, you know. Didn’t you hear me yell out to you to turn on the news and see the Halloween Miracle? It was these fellows here I was talking about.”

  Tina asked G. R. how much he’d had to drink and went back inside. She turned off the back-porch floodlights. Darmon said, “We didn’t mean to get you in trouble.” His Penitent Thief son said the same.

  “Y’all have to forgive her. She doesn’t know how she comes off sounding. I keep waiting for her to turn a corner, but it doesn’t seem to be happening.”

  Darmon said there was no need to explain. He asked if G. R. needed help putting the mowers back in the shed, and thanked him for his kindness, and said they should be walking toward the shelter, anyway, in order to give some candy to his wife. The Penitent Thief handed over folded blankets and linens and apologized for any scuff marks. G. R. said he’d be looking out for them as the evenings got colder, and reminded Darmon to look for already-cut firewood beneath power lines.

  G. R. returned inside and went straight to his son’s room. He unfurled the sheet and blankets, then lay atop the bed. G. R. fell asleep praying for his wife to revert back to being the gamesome woman she’d been before the accident. He pushed his head deep into his dead son’s pillow and wondered what kind of willpower it would take to suffocate himself.

  Four hours later he heard the doorbell. Tina answered. Before he could get up he knew already that a merciless and committed person stood there—if not the Impenitent Thief, then another. He thought about how he would finally be able to tell his family’s story to anyone watching the early local news.

  JOHN CHEEVER, REST IN PEACE

  HE’D NEVER READ A JOHN CHEEVER STORY, SO THAT couldn’t have been the reason he traveled, dead of a massive heart attack, across his neighbors’ backyards aboard the Bolens seventeen-horsepower, forty-two-inch-cut riding lawn mower. And no one could explain later how Owe Posey’s machine veered inexplicably from swimming pools, gardens, overgrown pergolas, gazebos, kiosks, birdbaths, scuppernong vineyards, ancient and unused swing sets, the occasional mean barking tethered pit bull. It happened on one of those midsummer Sunday mornings when no one in Gruel, South Carolina, performed manual labor—for it was the Lord’s day—and everyone either drove twenty miles to the nearest church or hid their cars so people thought that they’d gone to Sunday school and eleven o’clock services.

  Owe had turned the key without telling his wife, Carla, that he would only cut the one-acre backyard, that Monday after work he would finish up the front yard and weed-eat around the shrubs, crabapple trees, hand-placed brick walkway; and their own birdbath, kiosk, pergola, unused swing set, and vacant koi pond. The night before, Owe and his wife had celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary at Roughhouse Billiards, on the square, and both of them drank too many cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Owe, for what it’s worth, had said, “I swear to God on our thirtieth anniversary I’m going to splurge us with a night up in Greenville at the Holiday Inn Express, right on Main Street. They’s a New Orleans-style restaurant within walking distance we can go eat shrimp.”

  He pronounced it “srimp.”

  Jeff the owner said, “Twenty-fifth anniversary’s silver, right? Well these PBR cans are mostly colored silver.”

  Carla said, “Do you have any Goody’s headache powders back there, Jeff? I got me a headache.”

  Owe’s parents named him Owen, but some kind of snafu at Graywood Regional Memorial caused the birth certificate to come back “Owe Posey.” His parents saw it as a sign and never fought the defect. Throughout his life, upon introducing himself, people thought he couldn’t finish a sentence beyond pronoun and verb. Owe would say, “I’m Owe,” and they’d expect him to continue: “I’mo go into town for a while,” or, “I’mo buy me a flyswatter and put some entomologists out of business,” or, “I’mo get me a beer—you want one?”

  He’d gotten to be a local hero back when Ed McMahon yelled out “Hi-owe!” loudly to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show whenever someone said anything a touch racy. In the 1970s, particularly, “Hi, Owe!” could be heard as he walked across Gruel’s tiny square.

  Jeff the owner shook his head. “We can’t get aspirin anymore. Gruel Drugs got some, I hear, but they’re closed.” He turned to two men attempting trick shots at the pool table. “Any y’all got a aspirin for Ms. Posey?”

  “I know it’s our anniversary and all, Owe, but I need to go home. My head’s banging. I just want to sleep, and sleep in tomorrow.”

  Owe wanted more booze. It wasn’t but eleven o’clock. He said, “Sure, honey.” To Jeff he said, “You think I can buy a few mini-bottles of bourbon off you? Me and Carla might have to celebrate in the morning, you know.”

  Jeff said, “This is the time when it’s good to live in South Carolina. You go up to a place like New York where the bars sell drinks out of a regular quart bottle, you can’t buy for take out. And I read the other day you can’t smoke up there in a bar.”

  Owe Posey said, “Goddamn.” He looked at his watch. “Goddamn. I’m glad it ain’t midnight. That would make it Sunday.”

  The Poseys drove two blocks home and parked behind their house. Carla went upstairs to bed. Owe said he wanted to draw out some preliminary plans for some preliminary plans down in the kitchen. He kissed his wife for the last time, then alone and convinced that Carla slept, tried to direct his satellite dish toward a Dutch channel he’d discovered one time wherein women tended their gardens in the nude.

  BOTH OWE AND Carla worked at Park Seed Company, he as a horticulturalist and she in the catalog department. He watered everything from snapdragons to habaneros mostly, and Carla took care of mailing. Owe pulled off dead leaves. Carla took care of telephone orders. They lived in Gruel because disrepaired antebellum houses in a town gone bust since the mid-1960s could be bought for less than thirty grand, even in 2004. They got theirs—a two-story, ten-room house with hardwood floors and two bathrooms—in 1980 for fifteen. The foundation crumbled, the walls held termites, the attic housed a bat colony, and the yard seemed to be a mole/vole/shrew breeding ground, but Owe insisted that he could set aside some of his paycheck each month and, inevitably, resurrect the place. “I’m betting we can refurbish this house by 2005, and resell it for forty, fifty thousand,” he said back in 1980. “Maybe more. If Graywood County ever grows and gets some industry, people will flock here. They’ll want to live in the suburbs of Forty-Five. Who wants to live in a big city?”

  And he was right, outside of industry coming into Graywood County. Owe had saved his money, re-mortared the foundation, and so on. Each year they paid more taxes due to their house’s tax assessment.

  “We have the best life possible,” Owe said to the TV screen in their kitchen. “We have a better life than even you women picking tulips.” He twisted off a one-and-a-half-ounce plastic Jim Beam bottle and held it upward, toward Carla directly above him. “What does anyone know.”

  Owe high-stepped out the back door, walked through the mudroom, and exited to his old empty koi pond. He sat on the rock edge and set his feet down in a melange of unripe, fallen pecan husks, wild morning glory, and tulip poplar pods. His fish disappeared one day, and word was either some frat boys at Anders College over in Forty-Five underwent some kind of scavenger hunt or one of the poorer citizens of Gruel got hungry. It didn’t matter to Owe. He just knew not to restock only to become disappointed.

  In the moon- and star-light it looked like his feet rested in an olive-green, orange, and purple swamp—as if he stood ankle-deep in his own septic tank. Owe looked to his right. An embankment of slightly tamed kudzu stood between his property and that of an abandoned house where, supposedly, Jefferson Davis once slept, a place owned by a man named Seabrook Pinc
kney who sent his kids up north. When the father died, no one returned to claim the house.

  Owe looked to the left and thought, I could take my car out of park and let it roll all the way down to Gruel Normal School, if I wanted.

  He opened another mini-bottle, then a third. He said to no one, “Why don’t these people ever admit that they drink a glass of wine every once in a while? What else could they do in Gruel? Some wine. Some claret. A gin and tonic, or julep.” His wife turned on a bedside lamp upstairs for about two seconds—enough for Owe to see a bat flit close to his face—then she switched it off.

  An hour after dawn, when Owe Posey woke up on the ground with his feet still in the ex-koi pond, he became oriented and thought, I want my wife. It’s our anniversary! He thought, I’ll start up the lawn mower and it won’t seem like I woke her up on purpose.

  PAULA PURGASON NEXT door said that he waved to her as he left behind a forty-two-inch path through her crab-grass and clover. She said, “Oh, Owe had his head on the steering wheel, but I thought he only kidded around. You know how he was sometimes! I remember one day he told me about a stray cat that came around and drank a cup of gas that he used with a toothbrush to clean the carburetor of his lawn mower. He said that cat lapped up some gas, then ran around in circles until it fell over stiff. I asked Owe, ‘It died?’ He said, ‘No, it only ran out of gas.’”

  Dr. Bobba Lollis, the pharmacist at Gruel Drugs, said, “He came by here long before we went to church. We go to church, you see, and we leave at 8:30. Anyway, I was out back putting sunflower seeds in the feeder, and Owe went by in a giant crescent, completely missing our little grandbaby’s wading pool. I thought he was only being neighborly, you know, cutting everyone’s grass. I thought he maybe thought it was Saturday.”

  “He’s lucky I didn’t shoot him,” said Victor Dees. “I got me some Lugers from down at my army-navy store. Shit, man, I seen him coming across from over Bobba’s house and the first thing I thought was head shot. Then I thought, No, just go for his tires. But I drank my morning coffee. They’s things I won’t stop to do when I’m drinking the morning coffee.”

  Bekah Cathcart shrugged. “I thought at first my ex-husband had come back to haunt me. Not that he’s dead that I know of. Of which I know. I’m merely glad that Owe Posey didn’t disturb my Zen meditation garden. I yelled to Owe, ‘Hey, you dumb SOB, don’t run over my Zen meditation garden!’ like that. In a weird way it looked like Owe tried to perform the cobra or sun salutation yoga pose. I have this sand pit, too, where I sweep circles. Some people use a rake, but I like to use a regular straw broom I bought from the Lions Club. Anyway, he drove around my special places. I didn’t know Owe Posey all that well—he kind of kept to himself and declined joining the Gruel Association to Sanctify History like the rest of us who hoped to improve the town. But looking back, that doesn’t make him a bad person. I think he was only shy.”

  Owe Posey ambled his way through a dozen backyards, up and down hills, then crossed Old Augusta Road. He cut hay dead for a good quarter mile through land no one claimed, and, finally, ran into a cement ex-silo at old Gruel Sand and Gravel, which now housed, partly, the Gruel Normal School.

  After headmaster Derrick Ouzts shook Owe Posey—and everyone in town wondered why Ouzts would be at Gruel Normal on a late Sunday morning—he called an ambulance. Ouzts also called Carla Posey and said, “I hate to disturb you, Mrs. Posey, but Owe showed up here on his lawn tractor and we needed to send him to the hospital.”

  Before he could say, “He seemed to’ve had a heart attack and didn’t know where he was,” Carla Posey said, “You sure it’s Owe? Lawn tractor? He only had a Bolens seventeen-horsepower, forty-two-inch-cut riding mower.”

  “Well, he showed up slumped over the steering wheel. That’s all I know. He lodged himself accidentally up against the old sand silo.”

  Carla looked out of the upstairs bedroom window. She saw a serpentine strip of cut grass heading east.

  And she laughed and laughed, though her head still throbbed.

  AT FIRST, OWE thought he’d been shot in the chest. He wondered if one of Victor Dees’s purported hand grenades lodged within his own rib cage and detonated. The coroner would later tell everyone down at Roughhouse Billiards that he’d never seen a heart that exploded such—that fragments of heart tissue catapulted into Owe’s spleen, liver, and lungs. In actuality it wasn’t quite the truth, but no one questioned the coroner’s expertise.

  In the split second between Owe Posey’s heart attack and his head’s subsequent thud onto the mower’s steering wheel, he thought, I shouldn’t have drunk that last mini-bottle; I shouldn’t have fantasized fucking that Dutch girl in her tulip garden; the capital of Louisiana isn’t New Orleans; I forgot to put Sevin dust on the Bigger Boy, Better Boy, La Rossa, Beefmaster, Early Girl, Mountain Delight, Early Cascade, and Sixty-Five Day VFFNT Hybrid Whopper tomato plants in greenhouse one, wilt, nematodes, wilt, nematodes.

  He thought, Carla deserved better than what I ever offered, and in his death ride he didn’t so much envision bright light beckoning from afar as he foresaw a long, long, forty-two-inch wide path where the citizens of Gruel could skip and frolic and forget about all the pressures of a meaningless life.

  THE GRASS NEVER grew back. When viewed from above it looked like a thin river Styx meandered between Owe Posey’s back porch and the center of Gruel Normal. At first all of Carla Posey’s neighbors wanted to sue her, or at least ask that she bring back some fescue from Park Seed. Then someone started the rumor that a man on his way to hell will leave a scorched mark on the earth at the point of his demise. Before long another rumor spread that Carla Posey practiced witchcraft, that she and Owe poisoned plants on their job, and that a bevy of hitchhikers could be found buried beneath their crawlspace.

  “I don’t give a damn if she’s a witch or serial killer,” Paula Purgason finally said at an impromptu Chamber of Commerce meeting. “We can use Owe’s dead path as a tourist attraction. Do y’all remember back thirty years ago when that little baby’s headstone glowed at night over in Forty-Five? Everybody thought it meant that child was another messiah. They had people showing up from three states away to witness that thing. Hell, a busload of Mexicans showed up, and they’re used to discovering Virgin Mary statues crying blood all the time.”

  Jeff the owner said, “I remember that tombstone. It ended up having some kind of phosphorous in the granite. The moon and nearby streetlight caused it to glow.”

  “We owe Owe,” Paula said. “He might be frying in Hades right now, but instead of castigating Carla we need to get her on our side. Maybe we can hire her as a tour guide of sorts you know, tell visitors all the bad things her husband did in life even if he didn’t do them. It would be like one of those ghost tours in Charleston.”

  Victor Dees, dressed fully in camouflage, shook his head. “First off, Owe Posey was a decent man. He worked hard, paid his taxes, and didn’t grow marijuana in his backyard even though he had the botanical abilities. Second, that death path to hell goes through my property, and I don’t want no witch and her tourists traipsing across my place. Maybe I got some old claymore mines planted back there, y’all don’t know.”

  Dr. Bobba Lollis said, “Oh shut up, Victor. I traipse around your backyard all the time when my dog gets loose. I vote we talk to Carla. I made the motion.”

  Paula seconded, and everyone in the makeshift unofficial Chamber of Commerce voted Aye except for Victor Dees. He said, “Nolo contendere,” the only Latin term he’d ever used.

  IN JOHN CHEEVER’S story “The Swimmer,” as any college English professor teaching a sophomore-level course in Literature of the Supernatural can point out, Neddy Merrill’s journey through the neighborhood pools goes from the Westerhazys’ pale shade of green all the way to icy, icy water at the Gilmartins’ house, then the Clydes’ pool where he could only keep his hand on the curb. In between Neddy found himself in sapphire-colored water, a dry pool, the murk of a public pool, opaque cold water
, cerulean water, and so on. Any college English professor worth his or her sheepskin will point out “symbolism” five minutes into class discussion, and how Neddy Merrill’s awkward and visionary escapade imitated the stages of human life, et cetera.

  But if the members of Gruel’s volunteer Chamber of Commerce, or the larger contingent of the Gruel Association to Sanctify History, had taken the time to consider Owe Posey’s half-mile adventure they might have noticed how his backyard remained shaded to the appearance of dusk even at noon. And where he ended up, after the hay field, was a white sand-covered lot. In between were various shades of dark green, olive-green, pale green, then yellow. Oh, if only one of the Gruel citizens had paid attention in college—or gone to an institution of higher learning that boasted an English department—then he or she would have no other choice but to sit in a corner and wonder if a philosopher might ever offer up any kind of valid epistemological answers in which to believe.

  Luckily for Carla Posey, she took that sophomore-level course. She studied Frankenstein, and “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Swimmer” at Anders College. She understood that the townspeople’s rumors were off base. Carla took a six-month leave of absence from Park Seed—her good boss said that he’d call it “maternity leave” since she’d never used one, since she’d been a loyal, committed, and trustworthy employee—and while grieving her husband’s sudden and untimely death she took to reading again. Sometimes she took The Stories of John Cheever to Owe’s grave site, sat on his non-illuminating tombstone, and read aloud. More than a few people noticed.

  When Paula Purgason showed up finally with a platter of brownies baked by Maura-Lee Snipes at Gruel Bakery, Carla Posey’s place was dark. The door was ajar, though, and Paula let herself in, chiming out, “Yoo-hoo, Carla? Are you home?” She thought, Has Carla gone to bed and forgotten to lock her door? Has she gone somewhere for supper?