Kinflicks (23 page)

‘Clem's not so bad.'

‘Clem's not so bad, but he's no Joe Bob Sparks.'

‘Yes, but Joe Bob Sparks isn't Joe Bob Sparks either.'

She looked at me oddly.

‘Joe Bob's not
that
great.' I was feeling pangs of regret. I had thought I was stepping up in the scheme of things when I renounced flag swinging and Joe Bob. I had thought that Maxine and the Bloody Bucket clientele were sublimely indifferent to the standards of the flag swinging set. Could Maxine be merely a frustrated flag swinger?

A middle-aged man sauntered over. He was dressed in green work clothes and needed a shave. A gaunt face, slicked down hair, a lanky but wiry frame. It was a configuration typical of the mountain men who had moved from the coalfields to work in the Major's munitions plant.

“How ya doin, Harry?' Maxine asked, pushing out a chair.

‘Not bad. Who's yer friend here, Maxine?'

‘Ginny Babcock. Her daddy's Major Babcock.'

The man's eyes got wide and he sat up straighter in his chair. I restrained myself from kicking Maxine. ‘Well, I declare,' he said with delight, sticking his hand, permanently stained with grease, across the table. I shook it gingerly. “We think your daddy's pretty special around these parts. I work up at his plant. Building Maintenance division. Yes sir, he's a great man, your daddy is — a patriot and a gentleman.'

‘I'm sure he'd be pleased…' I mumbled.

Harry said dreamily, almost to himself, ‘Yes sir, truly a fine man. Lord, you shoulda seen how we lived when I worked them mines up near Harlan. Wouldn't no
dog
live that way. Roof falls and float dust. Shoot, you couldn't
pay
me to go back there.' He looked up as though seeing me for the first time. “What you doin' in a place like this?'

‘I like it here,' I said with resentment.

Harry looked at me sadly and shook his head. ‘You
like
the Bloody Bucket. Does Daddy know where his l'il gal is at tonight?'

‘Uh, no. I mean, yes. Well, I mean he knows I've been here before. I don't know if he knows I'm here tonight or not.'

Harry sighed wearily. “I got me two daughters, and if either of ‘em
ever
showed up here, why, I'd…'

‘If you've got daughters and stuff, then what are
you
doing here?' I inquired victoriously.

A guilty look crept across his face. ‘Well, I was jest leavin',' he assured me, starting for the door. ‘I'm real pleased to have met you, Miss Babcock. Listen, you tell that daddy of yours that Harry over at Building Maintenance sends him a great big howdy.' He added with a cringing grin, ‘But maybe you might say we met downtown or somethin'?'

One night at the Bloody Bucket a trap door in the plank floor was removed to reveal a cock-fighting pit. Chairs ringed the pit, their backs facing inward to form a wall between the spectators and the cocks. Eight or ten men straddled the chairs, and others stood behind them. Wads of money lay on one of the tables.

Two tough-looking men in khaki work clothes took cocks from burlap feed sacks. One was red with a black tail and wing feathers. The other was gray and white striped. As soon as they saw each other, their neck feathers flared out like Elizabethan collars, and they started struggling to get at each other. Steel spurs were fitted onto their yellow legs. Bending over the pit from either side, the men released the cocks, who met each other spurs first in mid-air. The men backed away quickly and moved the chairs in to close off the circle.

Soon blood and feathers were flying everywhere. Shouting was filling the room: ‘Shit! Kill that red bastard! Rip him to pieces, you mother fucker!' Feet were stomping and fists were waving. Clem, sitting in the chair in front of me, didn't even notice when I removed my hands from his bony shoulders and walked away. His eyes were glittering and were fixed on the pit, where the interlocked pair of mangled roosters kept bobbing up and down in a flurry of spattering gore.

I stood by the windows, looking through the low-hanging willows at the moonlight glinting off the river. I liked this view at night. You couldn't see how the Major's factory had turned the river yellow and fringed it with white foam.

Floyd sauntered over. ‘What's the matter, baby?' he asked, throwing his dark hair out of his eyes with an indolent toss of his handsome head. ‘You don't like to watch things die?'

‘I guess not.'

‘Ain't you runnin' around with the wrong boyfriend, then?'

‘Probably.'

‘Then find another,' he suggested, putting his arm around me and pulling me up against his chest so that my nose rested on his elegant gold brocade vest. All I could think of was Floyd as a boy, trying to steal all of Clem's Scrooge comic books.

‘Dry up, Floyd.'

He let go of me and laughed. ‘Sure, baby. But when you work up to a
real
man, kid, you let Floyd know.'

‘Drop dead.'

‘Them French ticklers do much for you? Or in'nt our l'il Clem getting' it up for you these days?'

‘Go to
hell,
you miserable creep!'

Floyd laughed and strolled off.

Not only was my nonresponse to French ticklers none of his business, he'd touched on a sore topic — Clem's and my sex life, which was definitely not a source of bliss for either of us. Clem in recent weeks had tried binding my wrists and ankles with rawhide thongs to the platform in the bomb shelter. One night in the springhouse, he asked me to wear one of my stockings over my face like a burglar's mask. Another night he drove the Harley to the lonely stretch of dirt road between his house and Grandpa's cabin. Pantieless, I straddled him as he sat in the leopard-skin saddle and revved the engine with his gloved hand. But nothing seemed to work for him. We had never even approached the topic of what might work for me, what the goal was with regard to my physiology. The basic problem was that Clem was convinced that if he should discharge, he would be dead. This concept of the Ultimate Orgasm fascinated him at the same time that it terrified him. And the models on the posters in his springhouse made it all look so easy.

I watched now as the two men fished their mangled birds out of the pit. Both were still breathing, even though their feathers had been ripped out in clumps and flaps of jagged flesh were dripping blood. I didn't know or care which had won, but everyone else seemed to.

Floyd looked at his watch and yelled, ‘Okay, folks. It's time now.'

It was as though a switch had been thrown. Everyone but me raced around doing things. The lid was replaced over the pit. The chairs were returned to the tables. Floyd came over to where I was standing and lifted open another trap door. Two men carrying a wooden keg emptied its contents into the opening. I could hear the moonshine splashing into the river below. Clem lurched over and dropped half a dozen paper cups through the trap door.

Someone knocked on the door into the other room. Shortly Maxine and a black woman I hadn't seen before came out, followed by two men who were buttoning their trousers. The guitar player sat on the raised platform with his legs crossed, tuning his instrument. Clem brought out a cross-shaped sign with the words ‘Gospel Tabernacle' printed on it, and leaned it against the platform. Maxine and the black woman mounted the platform, and everyone else closed in around its base. Floyd appeared, hastily draping a fringed black silk ministerial stole around his neck and carrying a large Bible. He joined Maxine and the black woman.

Clem called, ‘Quick! Get over here, Ginny!'

‘Hit it,' Floyd said calmly. The guitar player started strumming softly. Maxine and the black woman searched around for their notes, and then swung into a rhythmic version in close harmony of ‘Oh Happy Day,' clapping in time. Everyone else joined in. Floyd cleared his throat.

Red lights flashed through the windows, and sirens whooped, and tires screeched. The door burst open as Floyd declaimed in a sonorous voice, ‘And thus sayeth the Lord…' In charged several troopers, brandishing pistols. They scurried into the other room, sniffing, like bloodhounds after a bitch in heat.

By this time Floyd was reading loudly and solemnly from the Bible,' “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God…He who resists the authorities resists God…” — And Maxine and the black woman and their clapping chorus were softly wailing in the background, ‘Oh happy day/Oh happy happy day/When Jesus walked/ Yes, when He walked/When Jesus walked/And showed the way.'

Floyd looked up from his Bible, feigning surprise, and said, ‘Good evening, sheriff. Always delighted to have you and your boys here. You know that.'

‘Damn you, Cloyd,' the sheriff snarled. ‘You done it again. But we gonna git you one day, buddy.' He and his men turned around and stomped out, and the cruisers disappeared.

The next evening at supper the Major said, ‘Don't come to
me
for bail.'

I scowled at him.

‘I don't know exactly what you think you're doing,' he said pleasantly, ‘but I hope to God that you get it done before you get into bad trouble.'

I didn't know what I was doing either, but I was damned if I'd admit it to him. In some obscure way, I think I was hoping to be commanded never to see Clem or the Bloody Bucket again.

‘Your mother and I have discussed it,' he continued amiably. ‘We could of course confine you to the house and install locks on your door and so on. Or we could throw you out altogether and be done with it. Or' — here he paused significantly, for effect — ‘I could fire Clem's father, and he'd probably have to leave town to find work.'

I looked at him quickly with hatred as he played his trump card — guilt. Would I sit by and see Clem's family ruined for the sake of my own personal pleasures, or hang-ups?

‘But of course I won't do that,' the Major continued. ‘Cloyd can't help it if he's raised an idiot son, any more than I can help having raised an idiot daughter. And so your mother and I are washing our hands of the matter, having offered our more mature perspective in every way that we know how. It would be time now, if you were planning to go to college in the North, to be doing something about it. Since you're not, I assume that settles the matter.' He took a bite of steak, thus concluding his dissertation on my character.

I was looking down at my plate, half-obscured as it was by my tits, which protruded in my Do-It Pruitt bra like two upended ice cream cones. At this point, I was the only child left at home and had the great good fortune of being the sole focus for their parental-anxiety syndrome. They had profited by their experience with me: Karl was happily ensconced at West Point, and Jim was sullenly detained at a military academy in Chattanooga. Only I had escaped the rigors of military discipline, and I was really rubbing it in.

I mumbled, ‘I never really
wanted
to go up north for college. That was
your
plan. I like it here in Hullsport. If I go to college, I'll go to State or Tech.'

‘Very well,' the Major (BA Harvard ‘39) said calmly. I was impressed by his self-control. I knew I was killing him, unaccustomed as he was to being disobeyed.

Mother quickly reviewed the various threats to which I was exposing myself through my continued association with Clem — being splattered all over the highway; being rounded up in a police raid (‘How would a police record look on your college application, dear?'); blinding myself from improperly distilled liquor; being stabbed in a knife fight; being raped and dismembered on a lovers' lane. Tellingly, she didn't breathe a word about the most likely afflictions — pregnancy and venereal disease. Apparently the bomb shelter and the springhouse weren't bugged by the Major after all?

‘But it's not
like
that,' I lied. ‘To hear you two talk, you'd think I was out
looking
for a way to get hurt, or something.' The conversation ended with their giving me sorrowful looks, as though I were in a leaking boat and they were pushing me off, expecting the waves to swallow me.

Which is what nearly happened. Because I had been the Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen the previous year, I felt a certain obligation to appear at this year's festival to crown my successor. Being Tobacco Festival Queen had fit my flag-swinger image, but it definitely
didn't
fit my current image as gun moll to Clem Cloyd.

Nevertheless, the morning of the festival I dutifully donned my yellow chiffon gown, and my carbine belt of a ribbon reading ‘Persimmon Plains Queen,' and my cardboard crown spangled with glitter. The Major drove me to Persimmon Plains because he was on the organizing committee for the festival. He wanted to handle his neighbors' tobacco and to watch part of the auction to see what the crop from our farm would bring. Mother came along for the ride, toting her Instamatic.

Persimmon Plains was a small town whose only distinction was its central location to the farming regions of east Tennessee. The auction barn was a huge wooden warehouse, its red stain, weathered and fading. The whole building looked as though it might collapse in a strong breeze. The inside was dingy and dark, and the plank floor was covered with shallow baskets of cured tobacco leaves and with throngs of buyers from the large tobacco companies and sellers from area farms. The sharp tingling odor of tobacco filled the cavernous room.

Blessedly for my bouffant hairdo, which was sagging under the weight of my crown, the crowning of the new queen was the first event. I dutifully plunked the cardboard crown on the head of this year's sucker, a cheerleader from Hullsport High, and kissed her cheek and smiled into the cameras. The Major hopped up on the platform. The Kinflick of that morning shows us in various poses conveying strained affection, alternately growling and smiling as flashbulbs go off on all sides. Then the wife of the farmer whose crop had won first prize climbed up to pose with the new queen and me. She wasn't much older than I and was dressed in faded bib overalls and flannel shirt. Her hair was dull and frizzy, especially in contrast to the glossy bouffanted manes of the new queen and me. Her wide smile revealed several missing teeth. She seized one handle of a basket containing some of her husband's prize leaves, and I took the other handle. My free arm I draped across her shoulder for the cameras. Her free arm was amputated at the elbow. She said she'd driven a metal point through her hand while stringing tobacco stalks on wooden stakes for curing. She'd wrapped a greasy rag around the wound and had gone on working. Then she'd forgotten about it. The wound had become badly infected, but she continued to ignore it. Gangrene had set in.