Pride Of Place

So Barnett, he blows back into town a month later, right on time, new shirt, new tie, embroidered vest of a kind a cowboy’d wear to a christening: rhinestones in a loop like a lariat above a blazon of letters in red velveteen: GB.

Out on the porch of the Slapjack he sat that very same night in his regalia, on the steps, in the dark, and smoked a cigar, and waited for Maggie to show. She’d be along by and by, the errands done, to set the kitchen for the morning and then retreat to the cubby of the room at the rear she called her own. Not much of a night-bloomer, Maggie.

He struck a match and beside him, there it was, in the ripple of light: one of them, what do you call it, vanity tables. White, with the gilt handles and the swivel mirror and the curvilinear legs there poking out from under the crinoline. Like a picture book, like from out of a movie, here comes Tallulah Bankhead, Hello boys, drifting out over the veranda with a cockatiel on her shoulder and a decanter of Muscadine at the ready.

“You’d have better luck with a butcher block, boy,” said Lynch.

“Maybe could she gut a fish on it,” said Bidwell as we rolled off into the dark.

“Drink one for me, boys,” said Barnett. And that was that.

That was that. Or so we thought. But then after midnight, the tipsy side of midnight, when the trees break loose from their moorings and the sidewalks buckle, we wandered back by again and there he was – Barnett. Right where we left him. The moon come and gone, the Slapjack dark as ever, the cloud of tobacco in the center of which he sat. Were it not for the rotation of the earth, that wobble of the axis that stirs the seasons and nips at the shanks of the faithful, were it not for the lubricant nature of your Seagram’s and your Johnny Walker, were it not for Bidwell the Brave, who bumpered off into the woods in pursuit of the moon, we might have seen what happened next. Not the what but the how. Not the legend or the rumor but the flesh of it. The skin. The salt. The breath of it.

* * * *

If you had eyes to see and ears to hear, if you were to outwait the moon and the stars, and hide yourself in the shadow of the sedge and under the bough of a maple where it crowds the railing of the porch, this is what you would hear.

The man: “I been waiting.”

The woman: “So it would appear.”

“I could ask you where you been,” said the man.

“You got no call to ask me that,” said the woman.

“Didn’t say I was. Asking that is.”

“But you could,” said the woman. “You could ask me.”

“I could. I could at that.”

From your vantage in the blind you would hear the creak of the steps, see the shade of the woman encroach upon the spherical of smoke and amberish light inside of which the man – sitting? standing? – sits. On the railing he sits.

“But I could ask you the same thing,” said Maggie. “Ask where you been.” Her face moved, a glancing blow now, into the fringe of the light.

“You could at that. But like you said.” GB took a draw. The cigar sharpened, yellow to red to yellow. Exhaled. “You don’t got no call to ask me that, do you?”

“Sail off to the Hesperides, did you?”

“Something like that.”

“Not a word of goodbye, no?”

“I got my reasons.”

“Everybody got a reason. Dog got a reason to kill a squirrel. Rain got a reason to fall.”

“I got – I picked up a little something.”

“So you hawking furniture now.”

“Maybe.”

“Furniture for ladies.”

“Maybe.”

“And the ribbon. What’s that about?”

What she didn’t see, what she missed on the first seeing, was the bow atop the pillar that held the mirror. Felt ribbon. Red like a cherry. Fastened like you fasten a bucket to a winch, and thick at the knot, a man’s knot, lubberly as a thumb. From the ribbon dangled – brief as a button, not but a glim in the dark – a ring.

“Ladies like ribbons, don’t they?”

“That what they tell you, these ladies?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Ribbons? Ribbons? I’m a lady. You never heard it from me.”

“To each his own, that’s what I say.”

“You never heard it from me.”

“Maybe you ain’t such a lady after all.”

She jostled the key in the lock. “And maybe you ain’t the gentleman you make yourself out to be.”

“Maybe I ain’t. Just maybe I got tired of being polite.”

“Polite?” In the doorway she turned, her back to the diner, her foot stoppered upside the screen door. The door quivered. Aching to close. “That’s too pretty a word for you. Fearful the word for you. So fearful of being you, you without the trappings – the land and the clothes and the fancy talk – you gotta hide behind a hunk of furniture with a ribbon up top.”

“It’s a gift,” he said. “A gesture. You so scared of a gesture?”

Into the dark of the diner she disappeared. The screen door slapped back into place. He gave it a good hard yank and followed behind. “You thinking a wave is a slap in the face,” he said. “Oh – that’s not a present, you say, that’s a punch in the nose. Ain’t nobody --” – slam – “ever offer you a gift before?”

She gave the key to the cash register a twist. The drawer sprang open. “You thinking a big gesture gonna make you into a big man. You and your mountain of maps.” From out a hidden pocket in the ribbing of her dress she pulled a sheaf of twenties. Jammed it into the drawer.

He stood in what was meant to be a leisurely pose, the one thumb a hook at the loop of the belt, the other a fulcrum at the fat middle of a Cuban cigar. The tie unraveled, draped like a tailor’s tape round the neck. The coat slung over the shoulder after the manner of a Crosby or a Sinatra under a streetlight in the rain. “I hate to be the one to tell you, but the Slapjack, it ain’t the center of the cosmos.”

Launched what was meant to be a smoke ring -- a halo of gray, like in the movies, like Private Eye Mike Hammer -- but his blood was up and his breath ragged. A raggedy plume. A shredlet. “You do what you do on account of fear,” he said as he flicked aside the ash. “You do what you do to cut me down to a size.” He set out through the flak. “To hell with you is what I say.” Banged into a chair. It sailed off in a spin. Flung his coat up onto the counter. It rattled the rack of Camels and Luckies and Chesterfields there beside the till. “You liked me better when I was a boy, but I ain’t a boy no more.”

She grabbed the mason jar of change off the top of the till and gave it a shake.

Down hard on the counter now with his elbows. “You got no call to be scared of me.”

Another shake. Obliterate the blather. Into the tray behind the bills she poured the whole jar – quarters, nickels, dimes – to hell with the count – slugs and marbles and rusty ball bearings. Fixed her eyes on the carillon of coin like it was the spirit of God upon the face of the waters. “You read that, didya? Outta them books?”

“I read the book of Maggie. Done memorized the book of Maggie.”

“You arrogant son of a bitch. You thinking that calling card of yours with the leaf of gold and the stamp of the lion gonna make you some kinda Lord of the Land of the Ladies.”

“Like you never heard of pride. Like you never play the queen. Ain’t that what you tell the vendors? You the Queen of Pie?”

“A pie’s a particular.” She slammed the till shut. “You get paid for pie. The people who pay? They get pie. Pie is what they get. Pie’s what I peddle.” She rounded the counter. From the cubby beneath, snatched the basket of maps and held it high. “I peddle pie. Other people?” She flung the basket off into the dark. “They peddle a promise.”

The maps caught the air, shivered out to sail whichever the way the air happened to carry. A scroll of foolscap size of a cookie sheet unfurled itself, did a backflip, glided round to crash into his knee. Topographic map of Sumter County, minty green with a skein of whorls in a surveyor red, the railroad a hashery of black stitches, the lakes in a spatter all random as amoeba in a bead of pond water. He gave it a kick in her direction. She kicked it back.

“I ain’t the fearful one” he said. “The fearful one is you.”

“I never seen a man so booming-up-over-the-rafter fulla of himself as you.” She snatched the cigar from his mouth and flung it off into the ether. A tomahawk. A bottle rocket.

He snatched the mason jar and pitched it off into the dark. Shatter of glass. Glitter in the moonlight. Gumball machine in a wobble on the rebound.

Nothing now between them but a body of air.

Why is it, out of the all the empty space in the world, you get of a sudden a space, a empty space, that got the feel of a something – what would be the word? – full. Most of the space we move through is empty. That’s the whole point. That’s what it’s for. Make way, right? Gimme some room. Space it out. That’s the space you ramble in. Rambling space. Not the same as traveling space, the space you take when you’re on your way to some other space, or resting space, the space you take when you’re altogether tired of space of any shape or size.

But that ain’t what we’re talking about here. Not a ramble, not a travel, not a rest. This’d be a fall. A falling space. Falling like an apple falls. Like it’s gonna hit something. That’s what it means, the wording falling. Otherwise you’d say Hey – it’s moving. Lookit the apple move. Where’s it going? Who knows? Goodbye, apple. No. To fall is different. To fall means you got a something out there, a something else, a something you gotta answer to. The apple gotta answer to the earth.

It’s the toward part, see? When you falling toward something, you got less and less space between you and the something. Most of the time – like off a five-story building – you don’t got the time to ponder the nature of the space you got left. But when the falling is slower, much slower, you get to thinking about the empty in between the you and the other. That’s why, of a sudden, the empty gets to be so full. Here comes a collision. Slow motion. You can feel it. The pulse of the flame at the fringe of the wick.

“Scared of being little’s what you are, little man. So damn big with the walk and the talk and the dress.”

“Scared of your own skin is what you are.”

Into the empty between them she stepped. “So scared of being you, gotta hide inside a cloud of smoke and a thicket of words and a set of silky threads.”

Up he stepped to claim his share of space. “God forbid you feel the touch of a hand.” Another step. “All up in a rage when a fella dares to step inside that shadow of yours.”

“You gutless wonder!” Not so much a step as it was a surge in his direction. “Look at you! Look at you! What the hell you trying to hide?” She shot out a hand to yank a button off the breast of his shirt. “What sorta fella – out hawking the dirt to the bricklayers and the diggers of ditches – gotta accouter himself in a shirt of silk?”

“What sorta gal starts to limping the second a man takes a step in her direction?”

“I am what I am. I don’t hide what I am.” She grabbed the front of the shirt. Gave it a shake, like you shake a slicker to shed the rain. “What the hell you hiding from?”

He grabbed her wrist with the one hand. “You wanna see? You wanna see it?” With the other he pawed like a bear at the shirt he wore. “Take it then! Take it!”

The buttons flew. The silk ripped. He reached back, at the back of his collar, as if to shuck it off altogether. Even as she fought to break his grip -- her hands in a clasp on a coil of silk -- she twisted the fabric round and round her fist. A tussle is what it was, a savage sorta rumba, him in a fury to cede the shirt to her, her in a fury to what? To claim it? To push it away?

They got as far as the basket of linen at the base of the hatrack – the napkins and the sheets and the cloths for the tables. She’d stripped them off the clothesline at the height of the day, step ahead of a sudden shower. Wrestled the basket inside and dropped it there at the door between the diner and her bedroom.

The wicker broke with a crackle from the weight of their bodies, disappeared in the tumble of whites and the flash of the limb. Over the crumple of red checker they rolled and onto the tangle of sheets. Never was there better a bed than here, on the floor of the diner in the high pile of the bedding fresh – the smell of soap, Florida flame azalea, smoke from the mound of the burning of the leaves. The hat rack they toppled, and the tinny stand of the stamp machine, and the wire caddy with the clamp up over the fold of The Orlando Sentinel (Mercy Plane Crashes On Peak). Not no more than a clatter of rain to them.

Firm as a blossom the fabric, sculpted by the sun and crisp. She pictured him brutal as a bear and heedless. She was wrong. He pictured her skittish and fierce in a flight from the touch of a lover. He was wrong.

Easy to picture the scene, in the dark, the stations of the flesh – not so different than a billion other collisions that people the planet. But that ain’t the all of it. Easy enough to collide with the other, but not so easy to know what it means in the meeting, in the moment, when a particular of two become -- for not but a moment – a one. Picture a waterfall. Waterfall a thing unto itself. It ain’t the rock, or the water, but the fall of the water over the rock that burns in the bright of the day. Sings in the dark of the night.

So in the aftermath, when his hand traveled her withered leg below the knee, and her fingers traveled the welt and the tor and the furrow that covered his back, it was knowledge they were after. To know someone. So the Bible says. A knowledge of the other like unto a blind man’s knowledge of the world. Touch by touch.

Maggie the one to finally speak. GB lay belly down in the comfy debris, his head pillowed on a fist of linen. Her hand on the small of his back. “Who did this to you?”

“Nobody.”

“Tell me.”

“Nobody important.”

His hand reached back to find her ankle. She slid closer, offered herself up to the touch. The stick of a shin. The misshapen foot. Almost a whisper the way he said it. “Who did this to you?”

“God,” she said. Clear. Matter-of-fact. Like you state the date of your birth to the fella at the bank. Brushed her fingers over the red of the ridge between his shoulders. “Now answer my question. Who did this to you?”

“God good a reason as any.”

“Shame on you. Amateur. Surely you got you a better lie in the making.”

“Shame on you for such a low opinion of my ability.”

“Shame on you for dodging the question. Who? Who was it?”

“I don’t recall anybody picking you to be the prosecuting – ”

“So now I gotta be asking permission to be asking?”

“Nothing to ask. It ain’t nothing. It don’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

He pulled away. Rolled over and sat up cross-legged, the bedding in a gather at his waist. “It ain’t no matter to me whether it matters to you or not.”

“So you telling me what? I don’t matter?”

“That ain’t what I said. I said you could make it a matter. Make it up into a matter. But that don’t make it a matter I gotta give a answer to.”

“It ain’t me the one to make it a matter. You’re the one to make it a matter. Look at you. Look.”

“You’re the one with the answer me this and the answer me that. What the hell is what I say. What the hell. Turn a conversation into a catechism!” As he spoke he – on hands and knees, tablecloth for a kilt – tore through the wash to find the pants and the shoes and the niceties that accompany the man about town, the skivvies and the socks and the vest with the watch and the fob and the stickpin of silver.

As she spoke she gathered herself up, a sheet across the one shoulder and tied beneath the other like a toga. “Nobody said you gotta answer.”

“And you the curator, right? You the Queen of the Confessional.”

“Nobody said you gotta answer to what I say.”

“Don’t sound like it me. Sounds to me like – ”

“Don’t try to tell me what I said. I said what I said. I know what I said.”

“If you’da known what you said, you wouldn’t have said it.”

“Now who’s telling who to answer to who?”

“I forgot. I forgot. Maggie don’t never answer to nobody.”

“You’re damn right I don’t. I don’t answer to them who don’t got the balls to answer to a simple question.”

“Well that cuts it. That cuts it.” He stood in the doorway, shred of a shirt at the neck and the shoulders, the moon to his back, the vanity a body of white on the porch behind him.

If you were to hide at the border of the dark and the light, there where the tree tops over the porch and the scent of pine flavors the air, you’d just be able to see it. The man and the woman. The woman a silhouette inside the door with the screen. The man a cameo in the colors of the moon.

“So,” says the man. “So no sale.”

“I’m sure you got yourself a lady or two out there – ”

“What I got is a overstock,” says the man. “Fire sale. Clearance.” Screech of wood casters over planks of pine. “Here. Take it.”

“Last time I looked,” says the woman, “this weren’t the Salvation Army.”

“Free is free. You could sell it.”

“Free.”

“A gift.”

“I don’t believe in gifts. Gimme a price.”

“Gimme a barter,” says the man, so quick you know he had the words already at the brim.

“Depends.”

“I got a barter for you,” says the man. He sounds, not triumphant, but fierce in a quiet kind of way, like a man who pares a apple with the blade of a machete.

“Show me,” says the woman.

“My pleasure,” says the man.

You hear the door rattle. The woman steps back to strike a match, light the lamp in her hand, but the man – you can feel the weight of his body where it pinches the floorboards and vibrates out through the frame of the building – strides ahead of her into the dark.

If you were to crouch on the lip of the porch, then duck under the railing to peer just over the windowsill and past the shadow of the woman in the flicker of the lamp, you would see the figure of the man accelerate somehow, somewhere into the pall at the far end of the room. You would hear (even through the planks in the flooring feel) the shock of solid on solid, sledge on the body of a stump, the splinter of something massive, wooden and brassy and iron.

* * * *

And then came the morning, and the Slapjack the same as it always was, the porch empty, the dust re-arrayed, the tally of flies intact. On the inside, not a molecule amiss, not the twist of a whisker, but for the one thing. That stool of Barnett’s. Gone. Yanked out by the – no. Snapped off, clean as a carrot, snapped off at the base.

Barnett he came in as per the usual but to the opposite end of the counter now, up at the till by the Chiclets and the Sen-Sen. No vest. No tie. The shirt askew as if he’d slept in it, and a strip of cotton round the right hand, hint of a stigmata in the crease of the palm but all the same a smile, grim kind of smile, more like a slash than a greeting.

Out the kitchen comes Maggie, out over the hole in the air that held the stool, not a word, not a sign, nothing. We thought to say something cute, Happy Birthday or the like, but thought better of it. In the singular it pained us to see him suffer, not for his pain, no, but for (and who could have guessed it?) our own. In the singular, you see, it seemed as if we were him, the sorry son of a bitch, and every time he limped we felt the twinge.

Not that we’d admit to such a thing. What business was it of ours? God decrees the bodies part, and they part. The blow to the heart that hobbles, right? Lynch the Daddy that beat him, Duffy the buddy that broke him, Bidwell the wife that bed the other man. Or Porter, Porter the love of the bottle, or Joe the love of the mirror, or Cochrane -- the box of Cohiba’s in the trunk of his Chevy, you know, remember? With the cigars in the cellophane sleeves and the each of them tied with a ribbon -- blue, a boy, it’s a boy, he said. Stillborn. A boy. So to hell with that. To hell with the hope –

Look. Look at him there. Elbows out, hunched up over the counter, head down in the menu like he never read it before, like you read a map in the middle of a nowhere, and her there with the little pad and the pen at the ready, two-handed the pad, tight up under the chin, the body brittle and the eyes looking down – hammer at the head of a nail -- down at the pad, and the each of them waiting, waiting for the other to say the first word.

Look at that. Look. Nobody ever listens.