under the big black sun: a fable
His mother upon seeing Mac seemed not startled but victimized by the fulfillment of some inevitable prophecy, and immediately began a recitation of her apartment's shortcomings. She walked away from the screen door, still talking. Mac let himself in.
Hers was the west end in a row of four apartments tucked below the pavement of Highway 80, hoisted on pilings along the bayou. It was not far from where he had lived in Cooper's trailer. He hadn't known, then.
In too-small purple knit shorts and hornrimmed glasses she went into the tiny, sack-littered kitchen and cited a stopped drain. "I ought to just throw everything out the window—that's where all the trash around here goes anyway. Into the bayou." The television was on, loud, and he heard running water somewhere. She eventually went into the bathroom to turn it off; Mac remained standing in the living area.
The floor was wooden and he could feel footsteps from the adjacent apartments. There was a knee-high brown ring along the papered walls and an unpleasant smell he couldn't place. She came back out, murmuring, and started, as if having convinced herself his appearance was an apparition.
"For a minute I thought I was in that old house of ours on Sherrouse."
"I think it got tore down."
"Oh. Well. You wasn't in it were you?"
Mac doesn't understand.
"When they tore it down, I mean. It's a joke."
"Aw, nuh-uh. How long you been here?" She estimated the time as three years. "Or thereabouts." He sat down upon a couch-convertible into which the bed had not been fully retracted, leaving an uncomfortable angle for his legs.
His mother poured herself a glass of uniced tea in the kitchen and returned with a cigarette. She brought a folding chair out from the hall closet and sat, despite the presence of a pair of recliners. He said he'd passed by her at work, in the ticket booth of Showplex 6. It was an old double theatre recently chopped into several considerably smaller auditoriums. Dollar admission. She nodded slightly. "I used to work for the man that owns it, when he was down at Third and DeSiard. That was back before y'all came along."
"You doing okay?"
"I guess I am. I hadn't thought about it. I don't complain. I'm not one to complain."
She asked if he wanted tea; he said he'd take beer. "Don't know that I have any—" She was gone a while, then returned with two cans, handing hers over for Mac to pull the tab, then his. "You working now?"
"Been thinking about going with UPS. Being a driver for them."
"They had a wreck on the interstate the other day, one of them. Stopped everything all up."
"Yeah. I had to sit for an hour."
"The driver got killed, that girl on the television said."
"I could see the ambulances and the stretcher. His leg was about clean off him. Had a wife and two boys."
Mac sipped his beer.
"I guess that means they got a opening now," his mother said. Long minutes passed. "You ought to put in for it."
"Guess so." They watched television and drank; Mac offered to retrieve more beer. The refrigerator was packed with cardboard cases of Old Milwaukee and little else. When he got back from the kitchen his mother moved to the couch beside him and spoke below the hyperbolic chatter of the evening news. A lot of the names she mentioned Mac didn't know.
"I know that girl, she's the sister of a real good friend of mine." Mac pointed at Kelly.
"Know her pretty good, huh?"
"She's nice."
"I always thought she looked like she could find herself a good time on a regular basis."
"She's pretty happy, yeah."
"MacArthur. I swear it wasn't me who dropped you on your head, but somebody sure did."
"You always made that up, Ma."
She lit another cigarette and leaned forward. Her legs were splotchy, rippled with what seemed like liquid pockets of fat. Thin stringlike purple veins traced paths between hundreds of freckles, now fading. A large raised mole sat a couple of inches down from her left collarbone.
"Those people next door make noise all the time." Mac feels vibration on the floor. "If they're not up all night, they're up all day, just out of whack enough to keep you from getting any rest whatsoever."
"What kind of noise?"
"You name it. They're loud. Get to fighting, and that'll go on for hours. Hear 'em getting slapped, one of them at least. And let me tell you, that's the sign. It gets real silent then. You might hear a thing or two said. Then, right after that, it's the grinding. The bedstead abouts to become falling apart."
"That's OK, Ma."
"I mean, hotter than monkeys in a jungle!"
"You don't have to, Ma."
"Her hollerin', and him hollerin'. Then her, then him. You wouldn't imagine how long something like that can go on. And I got just one question. What you think it does to somebody like me inside to have to listen to that?"
"The weather's coming on. Don't you want to see that?"
"An old lady like me. Don't you think it's kind of painful?"
Mac looked around for the channel selector.
"So. Whatcha here for MacArthur? I can tell you straightforward I don't have any supply of money to peel off for you."
"Ma. No I'm just stopping by—thanks anyway, I'm doing OK, got a little saved up to make a payment on the Fury, you know . . . thanks, though. I don't need none."
"Good."
The news went off. For the first time she turned the sound down, pulling the remote control from beneath a cushion. "Have you talked to Johnny?"
"Yeah, that's how I got where you live."
She began to speak nostalgically of the time when John had once sent fifty dollars for her birthday. "But that was before he got married and had kids." Mac was certain that his sister had mailed the money that time.
"I went to Connie's the other night," he said. "She wouldn't say nothing to me."
His mother scowled. "You got a girlfriend? Besides that TV girl?"
"Aw, she ain't. Yeah, I date some ladies now and then."
"Not a strong suit of yours, as I recall."
"I do all right."
"Now that wadn't the case with Johnny. They was knocking on the window all night. I wouldn't never get no sleep if I hadn't run them all off. Shoulda steered some of them your way, huh."
"Ma."
"At least you wasn't born no girl. I believe most mothers would tell you one girl is exactly one girl too many to have. A girl is like some stray cat that gets pregnant young and stays pregnant. One thing I can't stand is a slutty acting girl." She pronounced the word as if it came from deep venomous pits inside.
He didn't know what any of this had to do with Connie. If he hadn't heard it many countless ragged times he would have thought she was talking about someone he'd never known, never even met.
"Fancy pants swaying. Letting 'em have a tiny little peek ever time you turn around. Just a little tease never hurt nobody. Don't you know everbody in the room just wants to look at you, only you, and every other split leg human ought to just go ahead and die right then and there for all the good's it going to do them as long as you're in the world and there's a man, any man, to look at you.
"Every last scrap of cloth looks good on you cause you're fourteen years old and so full of yourself. What's the point of a girl wanting nice things, cause no matter what it is, it looks good because of that young girl body and its going to come off anyway, isn't it.
"Nope. You were born a boy, MacArthur. And I was glad of it."
She rose from the chair and left the room. Soon the water was running again. He heard her murmuring as before. He finished the beer. "I'll send you some cash, after I get working again. It's just a little slow right now." She said something he didn't hear, then called him, louder.
He looked in the bedroom; she wasn't there. Slowly he backed down the hall toward the living room. Warm, humid air spilled from the bathroom, stifling him. She called him again. He stepped inside, saw briefly that she was already in the tub, and tripped in his haste to step away.
"I'm going now, Ma. . ."
"Wait—" She began to talk, more slowly now. Old Milwaukee cans spilled from the curtain beneath the sink. The toilet at the opposite end smelled unflushed.
The house he recalled more than any other had a blue toilet; that he remembered, and the suitcase-record player his mother played her sixties singles on and danced in a bathing suit in the living room and the time a man came to the screen door and she danced and pulled at her suit to the Cowsills and John and Connie and he were all ashamed and the man asked if any of them wanted to get out of the house and Connie nodded Yes but the man left without taking any of them.
"Yes ma'am. I've got to go on."
There was more; "A whole lot nobody ought to never have to endure, I mean to say, and then she goes and tells him what I said and I never done it and I dare anyone to come up with any sorry thread of evidence that I did, and to get convicted and hung without a trial and then her staying out to 3 AM with that boy and he goes Ma'am, my family dates back to Don Juan Miro in the 18th century right here on the river. And what does she do but fall over in a faint. And this cheap-dye-platinum telling him I said what I never did any such. Now that one can go to Florida and entertain labrador retrievers for seventy-five dollars a party, as far as I'm concerned. . ."
She called him again. As he pulled the screen door going out he could hear the slapping of the washcloth upon the water.
