This One and Magic Life Page 8

  He turns on his right turn signal and exits to the airport. The Sullivan-Threadaway jet is in the area where large companies keep their planes. Donnie circles behind the hangars and finds a parking place. Heat shimmers in waves about the black asphalt and hits him as he opens the door.

  “Uncle Donnie!” May waves to him from the door of the small waiting room for private plane owners. “We’re in here.”

  Donnie had half-expected Hektor to show up. But to bring May! He can’t believe Hektor would subject her to this.

  “He’s talking to the pilot,” May says. Donnie brushes by her. He sees Hektor behind the counter with a tall man, a man so bald his head looks shaved. The two are bent over a map spread out on a table; the man is marking something on it with a pen.

  “Hektor,” Donnie says, “I told you I wanted to do this by myself. I don’t want you to go, and I certainly don’t think May should go.”

  Hektor looks up in surprise. He hadn’t heard Donnie come in. The man with the pen turns away, not wanting to get involved.

  “We’re not going with you, Donnie,” Hektor says. “We’re going to Mississippi. I just came by to see that everything’s okay.”

  Donnie’s anger rushes away and for a moment nothing takes its place. He stands there silently, waiting for an emotion which eventually turns out to be emptiness.

  “Wait, Jimmy,” Hektor says to the bald man who is leaving. “This is Jimmy Tucker, your pilot, Donnie.”

  Jimmy turns and the two men shake hands. “Donnie and I’ve met before, Hektor,” Jimmy reminds him. “I flew him and your sister to Rochester last year.” He turns back to Donnie. “I was so sorry to hear she had passed away.”

  Donnie remembers a pilot with hair, not someone with light glinting from his head. “Thank you,” he says.

  “I’ll just go and check everything out. You come on whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy,” Hektor says. The tall man nods, picks up the map they had been studying, and leaves. Hektor takes Donnie’s arm and leads him to a row of connected orange fiberglass chairs. “Sit down a minute and I’ll tell you what May and I are going to do. Let me go check on her, though.”

  “She’s okay. She’s right outside,” Donnie says. The two large men fold their bodies into the uncomfortable chairs.

  Hektor clears his throat. “Well, what I said about May and me going to Mississippi. We’re going for a priest.”

  “For what? I thought you and Mariel had it all arranged. Did Father Carroll find out the casket’s empty?” Donnie doesn’t know where the sarcasm came from. God, he’s tired.

  Hektor ignores the sarcasm. “We need a priest for Artie, even if she is cremated. I’ve been thinking about it. You know as well as I do that she has to have a funeral mass, just like you and I’ll have to have one.”

  “Look, Hektor. If you think you can find a priest to say a mass over Artie’s ashes after another priest thinks he’s buried her body, forget it. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “It matters to me, Donnie.”

  Donnie suddenly sees a fourteen-year-old altar boy holding the chalice for the priest’s blessing. He remembers the expression on Hektor’s face, rapt, nourished by the mysteries, believing in redemption.

  “Why Mississippi?” he asks.

  “There’s a group of people who live up the bayou not far from Pascagoula. One of them’s a priest.”

  Donnie knows what’s coming. “And this group of people. Do they speak English?”

  “Not much.”

  There is so much Donnie wants to say. What he says is, “Don’t get yourself in a passel of trouble with the feds, little brother.

  Hektor grins. “You sound like Mama,” he says. “ ‘You boys are going to get in a passel of trouble.’ ”

  “We did, too.”

  “All of us.” The brothers sit quietly for a moment.

  “But we had a hell of a lot of fun part of the time.”

  “That’s for sure.” Hektor looks at his watch. “How did we get on this, anyway? Listen, the plane’s ready. Artie’s already on it. And Patty James will be helping Jimmy out. I asked for her especially. Married and three kids, but just looking at her gets the old juices going. You can do a little daydreaming. Anyway,” Hektor stands, “we both need to get going if we’re going to get back tonight. You’re sure you’re okay?”

  Donnie gets up slowly. “I’m fine.” They come together in an embrace so hard it hurts their ribs and startles them both.

  “God, Donnie!” Hektor says and rushes out the door calling for May. By the time Donnie gets outside, Hektor and May are almost to the pickup. May turns, sees him, and waves.

  Jimmy Tucker sticks his head in the door. “We’re ready, Mr. Sullivan, when you are.” Donnie follows him to the plane. He has been wondering where they would put the casket. Now he sees it’s in the aisle in what Artie called the living room when they had gone to Mayo last year on this same plane. Donnie eases by it and sits in a blue leather chair. It’s hard for him to realize that such luxury as this plane belongs to Hektor who drives pickups that junkyards would refuse.

  “Buckle up, Mr. Sullivan,” says a female voice. Donnie snaps his seat belt and places his hands on Artie’s casket. The engines whine and the plane vibrates. “Here we go, Mr. Sullivan,” says the voice. Donnie leans back and waits for the thrust of the jets.

  Five minutes later, they are over the bay and he can see Harlow. He should have called Dolly this morning. He wonders what she will do about the house and everything else. At twenty-seven, she’s not going to make it as a dancer. Not much of a future choreographing for kids. Artie had lucked into a good deal with her painting. She could work when she wanted to.

  He smiles a little. He had made the mistake once of telling Artie he thought she was lucky; it made her furious.

  “Screw you, Donnie Sullivan,” she said. “I work like hell and I’m a goddamned good artist.”

  Patty James comes in from the cockpit. Instead of the uniform Donnie had expected, she’s wearing jeans and a beige silk shirt. In her thirties and redheaded, she is, as Hektor had said, decidedly attractive.

  “Let me make you a drink, Mr. Sullivan,” she says. “Almost anything you want. And we have some sandwich fixings. I’m going to make Jimmy and me one. Have you had any lunch?”

  Donnie shakes his head. “Nothing to eat, thanks. I’d like a vodka tonic, though.”

  “Sure.” Patty eases around the casket and goes to what Donnie knows is a complete kitchen and bar. He hears bottles opening and ice rattling. In a moment she’s back with his drink. “Here you go.” The drink comes in a glass with the Sullivan-Threadaway Imports logo on it. The napkin has the same logo, a tree that appears to be an apple tree with a bunch of bananas hanging from it. Artie had declared it a wonderful logo the first time she saw it, the ultimate of artistic license.

  “You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat?” Patty James asks. “Some snacks?”

  “I’m positive.”

  Patty sits on the arm of the chair across from Donnie. The fabric of her jeans presses against her thigh and makes a wonderfully curved line. Donnie admires this as he would any finely crafted work of art. No juices. God, he is tired. He takes a large swallow of his drink.

  “Mr. Sullivan, I just want you to know how sorry I am about your sister. I’ve admired her work for a long time, and I was on several flights with her. She was a wonderful lady.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I kept that article that was in Time a couple of years ago that had all the pictures of her paintings, and she signed it for me and did a little pencil sketch around the edges. I have it framed in my bedroom.” Patty stands up and pats the casket self-consciously. “Anyway, I just wanted you to know. She touched a lot of lives.”

  “Yes, she did. Thank you.”

  Patty nods and goes back to the kitchen again. In a few minutes she comes by with some sandwiches and disappears into the cockpit. Donnie nurses his drink and looks out
at the green that is South Alabama. Farm ponds reflect the sun; a school bus sits motionless on the interstate.

  Donnie wants to open the casket and talk to Artie, hold her hand. He needs to tell her that he, Donnie, is not sophisticated enough for cremation. He needs to ask her why she wanted this when all he wants is to put her in her yellow dress by Mama and Papa or by Carl’s marker and take her flowers on their birthday and be buried beside her someday. He places two fingers against the cold gray metal. That wouldn’t be bad, up there in Myrtlewood, Artie. Maybe Hektor would come, too, and Mariel, of course, and eventually Dolly and her children. Surely she’ll have some kids. Maybe May and her family, too.

  He leans over close to the casket. “Artie,” he whispers, “why in hell are you making me do this? Is there something here I’m supposed to understand that I’m missing? Is it Mama? Zeke Pardue?”

  The air conditioner is too low; Donnie is freezing. He gets up and goes to fix another vodka tonic. On the counter in the little galley is a jar of beer nuts. He takes a handful with his drink and goes back to his seat. He is shaking so hard the ice cubes in his drink rattle against the banana tree on the glass.

  On One Life to Live, Vicky Buchanan is having brain surgery to rid her of the evil Nicky Smith who is her alter ego and who pops out at crucial times in Vicky’s life to go to bars and pick up men and generally cavort in a manner unseemly for the ladylike Victoria.

  “Goodbye, Vicky. You’ll miss me,” says Nicky, rising from the body on the operating table and wafting across the room. A last toss of her rakish red wig and she is out the door.

  “I’m gonna miss her,” says Reese. “She got Vicky in a lot of trouble.” He, Dolly, and Mrs. Randolph are sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch and watching TV. Reese and Mrs. Randolph are glad to have Dolly in the chair that has been empty for weeks. They were just sitting down as Dolly came in, and they insisted that she join them. “Just drink some iced tea, anyway,” Mrs. Randolph said when Dolly hesitated. “Make you feel better,” Reese added, pushing the chair out.

  “That Nicky was no good.” Mrs. Randolph points a fork toward the TV. “You watch this?” she asks Dolly.

  Dolly shakes her head no. “Well, when I was down here, I’d watch it sometimes with Artie.”

  “Artie did like her stories,” Reese says.

  “Well, Nicky was all in Vicky’s mind,” Mrs. Randolph explains the story line, “because she was abused as a child.”

  “Her very own daddy. Off in the head.” Reese takes another helping of potato salad. “You know, I knew a man once thought he was a chicken part of the time, sort of perched on his steps and crowed. Never bothered a soul and nobody paid him much mind. Got run over by a train, though. Number Six on its way to Montgomery. Real slow train, too. Makes you wonder.”

  Dolly and Mrs. Randolph think about this for a minute. Dolly sees the man perched on the track crowing at the oncoming Number Six.

  “The mind can do strange things,” Mrs. Randolph says. “My brother Rudy was out in the field one day baling hay and not a cloud in the sky and bam! A streak of lightning came out of nowhere and knocked him down. Near about electrocuted him, but it turned out all right. Anybody want anything else?” Mrs. Randolph gets up from the table.

  “Not a cloud in the sky?” Reese asks.

  “Not a one. My papa was with him and had to beat him on the chest.”

  “Where did the lightning come from?” Dolly wants to know.

  “God knows. Bless Rudy’s heart, though. He was the first of us children to go. Got it in his mind that if he went outside, lightning would hit him again. We all told him that was crazy. Finally talked him into going out.”

  Dolly is intrigued. “And lightning hit him again?”

  “Of course not. A bee stung him, though, and he went into some kind of shock. Died before we could get him to the hospital. He was my favorite brother, too. I don’t make any bones about it.” Mrs. Randolph begins to rinse the dishes. “Eat that fruit salad, Dolly. You need something in your stomach. You’re skinny as a rail.”

  Dolly is having trouble with one strawberry going down.

  “I knew a man got hit by lightning twice,” Reese says. “Both his arms looked like a zipper running up them.”

  Mrs. Randolph sits back down. She’s rubbing Jergen’s lotion on her hands. “Well, some people are just plain magnets, aren’t they?”

  Reese agrees. “God’s truth.”

  On TV Vicky is waking from surgery. She reaches toward her husband who offers her a huge strawberry. Dolly knows she needs to go rest.

  SEVENTEEN

  Daylilies

  AFTER YOU CROSS THE MISSISSIPPI LINE, ANY EXIT ALONG 1–10 will take you into bayou country. It stretches the width of the state, swampy, fertile. Hektor turns just past Pascagoula and heads inland through swamp grass almost as high as the truck. He crosses dozens of small bridges that span dark, unmoving streams. Beside him, May concentrates on the bottle of Dr Pepper into which she has poured a package of peanuts. Every time she turns it up, Hektor holds his breath. He has only seen the Heimlich maneuver on TV. Besides, by the time he stopped the car and got her out, it might be too late. “Please be careful,” he says. May smiles at him, puts her thumb over the bottle top, and shakes it. Foam and peanuts bubble up; she clamps her mouth over the bottle. Her cheeks swell like small balloons.

  “Quit that,” Hektor says.

  May burps and chews.

  “A lot of flying saucers land in here,” Hektor says.

  May looks at the grass, the stunted palms. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You just see it all the time in the paper. Two fishermen from Pascagoula said they got carried for a ride.”

  May looks at Hektor. “You don’t believe that, do you, Papa?”

  “No. But I think the men believed it. Something happened to them out here that scared them nearly to death. I saw them on TV still shaking.” Hektor remembers how big the men’s eyes were, how they stuttered. “Never put any foreign substances in your body, May. Promise me.”

  “I promise.” May shakes the Dr Pepper again. Hektor sighs.

  They are entering an area of thin pine trees that lean away from the prevailing wind off the gulf. Not for the first time, Hektor thinks of the people who paved this road. There must be cottonmouth moccasins in here as big as boa constrictors. And alligators and mosquitoes and leeches that would grab you like they did Humphrey Bogart. He still wonders how they filmed that. If a flying saucer did land here it wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “There are some cars up there,” May says. “Maybe it’s a wreck or something.”

  Hektor pulls to a stop behind a rusty Chevy pickup and gets out to see why the road is blocked. A woman is sitting in the cab crocheting. Hektor nods hello.

  “It’s a gator,” she says.

  “What?”

  “A gator. Asleep on the road. Managed to get in both lanes. He don’t want to, but they’re trying to get him to move.”

  “How?”

  “Very carefully.” The woman and Hektor both laugh appreciatively. She wipes sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm. The little round crochet piece dangles for a moment in the air. She holds it out for Hektor to see. “A bedspread,” she explains. “Our youngest is getting married.”

  “That’s pretty,” Hektor says. “Well, let me go see what’s happening.”

  He starts away and then turns back. “Who’s marrying her?” he asks.

  “A boy from down Gautier. Nice boy. Just got out of the Navy.”

  “No. I mean the priest.”

  “You mean the preacher? Brother Edwards from Ruhama Baptist. That’s where we go. Why? You need a preacher?”

  “I’m looking for a priest who lives around here somewhere. You know one?”

  “Maybe you mean Father Audubon. They say he used to be one. They call him that because he likes birds.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  “No. Bouchet at the store could
probably tell you, though.”

  “Thanks. Where’s the store?”

  “Down the road. We’ll get there after while, I guess.” She wipes her forehead again.

  “Thanks.” Hektor walks back to his pickup. “It’s an alligator across the road,” he tells May. “Come on, let’s go see what’s happening.”

  “Hey, that’s great.” May jumps from the truck and starts running toward the front of the line of parked cars.

  “Wait,” Hektor calls. But May doesn’t slow down. She pushes through the small crowd and disappears. “Lord God,” Hektor hears her say.

  “Excuse me.” He wedges between two men and grabs May’s arm. On the road before them is the largest alligator Hektor has ever seen. It stretches at least ten feet across the middle of the road. Dead, Hektor thinks. But even as he is thinking this, the alligator moves its tail slightly. Twelve people move backward as one. Hektor snatches May back so hard she is airborne.

  “Don’t you ever do that again!” he hisses.

  “What?”

  What? Put yourself in danger? Leave me?

  “Say ‘Lord God’ like that. And get so close to an alligator.”

  “I just wanted to see him.”

  “So did Captain Hook.”

  “What?”

  Hektor sighs. He is raising a culturally illiterate child who won’t test well and who will never make it into a good college and it’s his fault.

  “That gator’s Big Ben,” the skinny redheaded man beside him says. “He does this ever now and then. We just wait till his nap’s over usually. Yell at him some.”

  “How long does he usually sleep?” Hektor asks.

  “Differs.”

  “I thought Big Ben was a bear,” May says.

  “That’s Gentle Ben.”

  “Big Ben’s a clock, though.”

  “Right. Goes tic toc because it swallowed Captain Hook’s arm.”

  “Whose arm, Papa?”

  “I’m not sure.” Hektor turns to the man next to him. “You want me to call the Highway Patrol or something? There’s a phone in my truck.”