Kinflicks (3 page)

“Neat,” Ginny said, stuffing it quickly into the pocket of her patchwork dress. “Thanks.” She decided not to wreck this moment of sharing by mentioning that her child's father had kicked her out and that she might never see Wendy again, much less mix Play Dough for her.

“Be sure to use all the salt. Otherwise they eat it.”

“I'll remember,” Ginny assured her, wondering if Ira really could prevent her from ever seeing Wendy again, as he had vowed he would. In spite of her apparent moral turpitude, Ginny was still Wendy's natural mother. Didn't that count for something in the eyes of the law?

The child had ripped the arm off her doll and was hitting her mother over the head with it. It occurred to Ginny, as the plane's engines were cut and she grabbed the handle of the emergency door preparing to wrench it open, that someone should invent a God doll — wind Him up and He delivers us from evil. Mattel could make a fortune.

Rather than spiraling down into fiery death, the plane began its normal descent into the Crockett River valley. As it emerged from the fluffy white clouds, Ginny could see the Crockett, forking all along its length into hundreds of tiny capillary-like tributaries that interpenetrated the forested foothills and flashed silver in the sun. The treed bluffs on either side of the river were crimped like a piecrust of green Play Dough.

Soon Hullsport itself was beneath them, its defunct docks crumbling into the Crockett. They were low enough now so that the river, having had its moment of poetry from higher up, looked more like its old self — a dark muddy yellow frothed with chemical wastes from the Major's factory. The river valley containing the town was ringed by red clay foothills, which were gashed with deep red gullies from indiscriminate clearing for housing developments. From eight thousand feet Ginny's hometown looked like a case of terminal acne.

She could see the factory now, a veritable city of red brick buildings, their hundreds of windows reflecting the yellow brown of the river. Dozens of huge white waste tanks, crisscrossed with catwalks of ladders like the stitching on softballs, lined the riverbank. Behind the tanks bubbled and swirled murky aeration ponds. Vast groves of tall red tile stacks were exhaling the harmless-looking puffy white smoke that had settled in over the valley like the mists of Nepal and had given Hullsport the distinction of harboring the vilest air for human lungs of any town its size in a nation of notoriously vile air.

The factory was having its revenge on Hullsport. It had never really been included in the town plan. Everyone knew that it was essential to the economy, in this region that relied mostly on dirt farming and coal mining. But aesthetically the factory had offended; and so it had been stuck out in the low flat flood plain of the Crockett, like an outhouse screened from view behind a mansion. But, like any suppressed or ignored or despised human function, the scorned factory had come to dominate life in Hullsport anyway through its riot of noxious exudations.

On the opposite side of the river from the factory, connected to it by a railroad bridge, a footbridge, and an auto bridge, was the town of Hullsport itself — the Model City, it had been nicknamed by its founder, Ginny's grandfather, her mother's father, Zedediah Hull, or Mr. Zed as everyone had referred to him. Faced with a lifetime in the coalmines of southwest Virginia, he had packed it in to come to this area of Tennessee. Then he had gone north and, in spite of his doubtful accent, had persuaded Westwood Chemical Company of Boston to open a plant in his as-yet-unbuilt model town and to back his project financially. At that time the rural South was regarded by northern businesses as prime ground for colonization, with all the attractions of any underdeveloped country — cheap land, grateful and obedient labor, low taxes, plentiful raw materials, little likelihood of intervention from local government. Mr. Zed then hired a world-famous town planner to draw up plans for Shangri-La South.

From the plane window, Ginny could see the scattered remnants of this original plan. Five large red brick churches — all various shades of Protestantism, all with white steeples of different design — surrounded a central green. From the church green ran Hull Street, which was lined with furniture stores, department stores, clothing stores, movie theaters, newsstands, finance companies, banks. At the far end of the street, facing the church circle and bordering on the river, was the red brick train station for the Crockett Railroad. The train station and the church circle were the two poles, worldly and otherworldly, that had been yoked together to pattern and energize the surrounding town. Out from this central axis radiated four main streets. Side streets joined these main streets in a pattern of concentric hexagons. Private houses lined the side streets. Squinting so as to see just the original pattern, and not what had been done to it since, Ginny decided that it looked almost like a spider web.

Alas, the master builders of the Model City in 1919 hadn't foreseen the domination of Hullsport life by the motorcar. No parking space to speak of had been planned for the church circle or the shopping street, and it was now almost impossible to work your way to Hull Street and back out again during the day. Consequently, half a dozen large shopping plazas and a bustling interstate highway now circled the original hexagon. The farmers, who had come into Hullsport every Saturday of Ginny's childhood in their rusting Ford pick-ups to sell a few vegetables and buy supplies and swap gossip down by the train station while squirting brown streams of tobacco juice through crooked teeth, were no longer in evidence. The railroad and the river shipping business had gone bankrupt, victims of competition with long-distance trucking. The red brick train station, with its garish late Victorian gingerbread, was deserted and vandalized, with obscene drawings and slogans painted all over the interior walls by the initiates of the Hullsport Regional High School fraternities. The station served now as a hangout for the town derelicts and delinquents and runaways, who congregated there at night to drink liquid shoe polish.

Nor had the town fathers, specifically Ginny's grandfather, anticipated the Dutch elm disease, which had killed off most of the big old trees within the hexagon proper and had left Hulls-port looking like a raw new frontier town, baked under the relentless southern sun. Nor had he imagined that six times as many people as he had planned for would one day want to leave the farms and mines and crowd into Hullsport, and that clumps of houses for them would ring the hexagon in chaotic, eczema-like patches.

Hullsport, Tennessee, the Model City, Pearl of the Crockett River valley, birthplace of such notables as Mrs.. Melody Dawn Bledsoe, winner of the 1957 National Pillsbury Bake-Off, as a banner draped across Hull Street had reminded everyone ever since. Spawning ground of Joe Bob Sparks, All-South running back for the University of Northeastern Tennessee Renegades — and prince charming for a couple of years to Virginia Hull Babcock, Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen of 1962. Ginny was prepared to acknowledge that time spent as Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen sounded trivial in the face of personal and global extinction; but it was as tobacco queen that she had first understood why people were leaving their tobacco farms to crowd into Hullsport and work at the Major's munitions plant, why there were no longer clutches of farmers around the train station on Saturday mornings.

The plane was making its approach now to the pockmarked landing strip that Hullsport called its airport. Ginny could see the shadow of the plane passing over her childhood hermitage below — a huge white neo-Georgian thing with pillars and a portico across the front, a circular drive, a grove of towering magnolia trees out front which at that very moment would be laden with intoxicating cream-colored blossoms. It looked from a thousand feet up like the real thing — an authentic antebellum mansion. But it was a fraud. Her grandfather, apparently suffering the bends from a too-rapid ascent from the mines, had built it in 1921 on five hundred acres of farmland. It was copied from a plantation house in the delta near Memphis. The design clearly wasn't intended for the hills of east Tennessee. Hullsport had expanded to meet the house, which was now surrounded on three sides by housing developments. But behind the house stretched the farm — a tobacco and dairying operation run now by none other than Clem Cloyd, Ginny's first lover, whose father before him had run the farm for Ginny's grandfather and father. The Cloyds' small maroon-shingled house was diagonally across the five hundred acres from Ginny's house. And at the opposite end, in a cleared bowl ringed by wooded foothills, across the invisible Virginia state line, was the restored log cabin that Ginny's grandfather had withdrawn to toward the end of his life, in disgust with the progressive degradation of the Model City.

As she swooped down from the clouds to take the pulse of her ailing mother, Ginny felt a distinct kinship with the angel of death. “I couldn't ask the boys to come,” Mrs. Yancy's note had said. “They've got their own lives. Sons aren't like daughters.”

“Indeed,” Ginny said to herself in imitation of Miss Head, her mentor at Worthley College, who used to warble the word with a pained grimace on similar occasions.

As they taxied up to the wind-socked cow shed that masqueraded as a terminal, Ginny was reminded of the many times she'd landed there in the past. Her mother had always been addicted to home movie-making and had choreographed the upbringing of Ginny and her brothers through the eyepiece of a camera, eternally poised to capture on Celluloid those golden moments — the first smile, the first step, the first tooth in, the first tooth out, the first day of school, the first dance, year after tedious year. Mother's Kinflicks, Ginny and her brothers had called them. A preview of the Kinflicks of Ginny's arrivals at and departures from this airport would have shown her descending or ascending the steps of neglected DC-7s in a dizzying succession of disguises — a black cardigan buttoned up the back and a too-tight straight skirt and Clem Cloyd's red silk Korean windbreaker when she left home for college in Boston; a smart tweed suit and horn-rim Ben Franklin glasses and a severe bun after a year at Worthley; wheat jeans and a black turtleneck and Goliath sandals after she became Eddie Holzer's lover and dropped out of Worthley; a red Stark's Bog Volunteer Fire Department Women's Auxiliary blazer after her marriage to Ira Bliss. In a restaurant after ordering, she always ended up hoping that the kitchen would be out of her original selection so that she could switch to what her neighbor had. That was the kind of person she was. Panhandlers asking for bus fare to visit dying mothers, bald saffron-robed Hare Krishna devotees with finger cymbals, Jesus freaks carrying signs reading “Come to the Rock and You Won't Have to Get Stoned Anymore” — all these people had invariably sought her out on the crowded Common when she had lived in Boston with Eddie. She had to admit that she was an easy lay, spiritually speaking. Apparently she looked lost and in need, anxious and dazed and vulnerable, a ready convert. And in this case, appearances weren't deceiving. It was quite true. Normally she was prepared to believe in anything. At least for a while.

Ginny remembered, upon each descent to this airport, spotting her mother and the Major from the plane window — each time unchanged, braced to see what form their protean daughter would have assumed for
this
trip home. When Ginny thought of them, it was as a unit, invincible and invulnerable, halves of a whole, silhouettes, shape and bulk only, with features blurred. She decided it was a holdover from early infancy, when they probably hung over her crib and doted, as parents tended to do before they really got to know their offspring. But this trip home there was no one standing by the fence to film her arrival — in a patchwork peasant dress and combat boots and a frizzy Anglo-Afro hairdo, with a knapsack on her back and a Peruvian llama wool poncho over the pack so that she looked like a hunched crone, the thirteenth witch at Sleeping Beauty's christening. Her mother was lying in a hospital bed; and the Major had “gone beyond,” as the undertaker with the waxen yellow hands had optimistically put it a year ago.

Apparently she was on her own now.

Her homecoming was less than festive. There were no drill teams in the driveway, no family retainers doing Virginia reels on the front lawn as she got out of the airport limousine. She struggled up the quartz gravel driveway, almost losing her balance because her knapsack straps were forcing her to stand up straighter than usual. She noticed that the lawn was overgrown and the tufts of coarse crabgrass were beginning to poke up among the gravel. She looked with pleasure at the graceful leaded-glass fanlight above the front door. Her home may have been a fraud, but at least it was a tasteful fraud. With a seizure of anxiety, she inspected the Southland Realty
FOR SALE
sign planted in front of the magnolia thicket.

“You're not
really
selling the house?” she'd demanded of the Major when she'd been in Hullsport shortly before his death a year ago.

“Sure,” he replied blandly, holding his pipe to his lips and lighting it with a match held in his left hand, with its alarming missing finger. “Why not?”

“Why not? Well, because it's our
home,
that's why not.”

“Not
mine,
it isn't. Do you and Ira want to move down and live in it?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Well?”

The last thing in the world she wanted to do was to move back to Hullsport. But it was reassuring to have something stable to reject.

Ginny jiggled the front door handle. It was locked. Setting down her pack, she knocked loudly several times with the huge brass knocker, which was badly tarnished. She had no idea whom she expected to respond, with her mother in the hospital — her childhood self maybe. She decided to look under the doormat for the key, since that was the traditional hiding place in movies and novels. Sure enough, there it was. Which raised the interesting question of why someone had bothered to lock the door in the first place, since the entire American criminal population would instantly look under a doormat for a key.