Shortly after we moved to Jackson, Aunt Violet told Garrett he could either find Tina a good housekeeper or a good divorce lawyer.
Fanny came to us through a friend who had to let her go when they moved out of state. A tiny, deeply religious person who looked like Cicely Tyson, Fanny hated card playing of any kind. Sis and I were always looking for the chance to deal a hand of spades just so we could watch her leave the room like her pants were on fire. Behind her back, we lovingly referred to Fanny as Worst Case Scenario, because no matter how bad you thought things could get, Fanny was always there to tell you just how bad.
Fanny loved movies. She also loved Omar Sharif. Monday afternoons, Sis and I gathered on the back porch where Fanny treated us to the details of whatever flick she had caught over the weekend, her short, nimble fingers relieving a mess of freshly picked field peas from their tough shells with a coarse, staccato ziiiip. Needless to say, our hero’s lowest points were punched the hardest, as were the endings, which she gave away first. “So. Zhivago and this lady are in all this snow. And theeen he dies. On the bus. After all that.”
“So,” she’d say with another ziiiip and a nod of her head, intimating the same fate could happen to any of us hearing the tale of horror and disappointment for the first time.
My father had recently begun visiting his brother in Grove Hill after church since we now lived closer. My mother decided those afternoons were going to belong to her. Most Sundays, she’d send me to the movies with my increasingly incensed sister. I pleaded with Tina to let me explore the creeks and gullies of Walker Springs Road with my new bucktoothed friend Billy Wade Gorman, but she said she’d rather know my exact whereabouts. Billy Wade’s father owned the local cement business and insisted on carting us around in his big silver cement truck, a vehicle which made Tina nervous. If I was with Sis, she wouldn’t have to worry.
Sis had decided to hold me personally responsible for Tina’s uncharitable act with a set of stringent ground rules that changed from week to week.
“I swear to God, if you act for one split second like you know me I will scratch your face off, do you understand me?”
Easy so far.
“You are to quietly and calmly approach me at intermission to see if I want anything. And if I do, you’ll take it out of your allowance.”
Okay. So this was gonna hurt.
“Aaand if I ever get to the theatre and find I’ve forgotten something—chewing gum or compact, whatever—then you have to go home and get it. And you can’t complain. ’Cause if you do, I’ll scratch your face off.”
Stringent rules aside, I soon became addicted to our weekly excursions to the Locke Theatre in downtown Jackson. Its crimson seats and tiled floors were kept sparkling clean by the Baileys, a Yankee couple in their seventies who had a checklist as rigid as my sister’s. Tiny as a stick with hair dyed just as brittle, Mrs. Bailey ran the box office with a clipped dialect that made her sound like she was from a different planet.
“One ticket. That will be one fifty,” she said. “One” sounded like “wan,” and we all mocked her when out of earshot.
Mr. Bailey was a World War II veteran who had lost both legs in combat, a fact that made him even more intimidating as he raced up and down the aisles at breakneck speed, his muscular hands propelling the wheels of the bright gold wheelchair, his teeth bared like a defensive James Cagney. “No running, no talking, and positively no fighting,” he’d say.
This last admonition was strictly for the Dick brothers, three fat redneck siblings who proceeded to beat each other senseless during the opening cartoon every Sunday probably, we decided, over the shared ignominy of their unfortunate last name.
Mr. Bailey would wheel his chair to a small control booth he’d constructed behind a navy blue curtain at the rear of the auditorium. There, he’d crank the volume to fit the mood during emotional peaks of the films. Whenever we saw the glint of one of Mr. Bailey’s wheels hustling up the aisle toward his beloved sound box, we knew something was gonna happen, and that something was gonna be good.
When the whistling score crescendoed, we knew the bridge over the River Kwai was gonna go. When the waves swelled so potently from the depths of the Atlantic we could actually feel it in our chests, there was no question the Poseidon’s seconds were numbered. Mrs. Haney, my fifth-grade teacher, said Love Story wouldn’t have been half as sad if Mr. Bailey had left well enough alone.
When the music pumped to ten decibels during Scarlett’s dirty radish scene in Gone With the Wind, Beulah Money, the librarian at the Methodist church, marched right up to Mr. Bailey and demanded he turn the blasted thing down, adding, “Those same bombs that took your legs in France must have snatched what was left of your hearing along with it.”
One of the drawbacks to Sunday matinees was that musicals always started on Sundays and played through Tuesdays, and I’d had to sit through more than my share. Sis liked to rub this in since musicals were her favorite and she knew I didn’t feel the same. I saw them all: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Paint Your Wagon, and every period piece Barbra Streisand warbled her way through.
One particular Sunday, having offered Sis a whole dollar to let me off the hook to no avail, I found myself watching Cabaret, yet another musical starring no one I’d ever heard of. From what I could tell from the previews, the movie was about Nazis and drunken whores hanging out in smoky German bars.
Patience Harmon, a comely fellow fifth grader from down the street, spotted me sitting by myself in my usual seat on the front row. She offered to sit next to me, a proposal I readily accepted, since Patience had the reputation of being a bit loose herself. Patience was one of five offspring belonging to a drab, blank-faced couple who read from the Gospels in lieu of giving away candy on Halloween. Her Bible-thumping parents would have suffered joint coronaries had they known what a bowlful of junk she was being corrupted with on this particular Sunday.
At a spot far into the film, the whore and her two handsome male friends were drunk, as usual, and dancing, as usual. But this time, they were all three dancing together, and the depraved manner in which they were ogling each other told me this scene was different from anything I’d come across in those other witless Sunday trifles. A wakefulness in the pit of my stomach felt vaguely familiar, like that split second when the cork on the end of your line disappears as a perch finally takes the bait.
And then somebody started singing some kind of German drinking song. I was thinking Patience was going to say something dumb and spoil the moment, but she didn’t. I worried Mr. Bailey would blast past us on his way to the sound box, but he didn’t. I guess he figured he shouldn’t play up the aberrant godlessness on the screen any more than was necessary.
Maybe, like me, he thought the visuals spoke for themselves.
* * *
“What did you think about the end? When she found out he was screwing her and him?” Patience stops mid-whisper, tossing the top of her hamburger bun into the trash can next to our picnic table in front of Gill’s Burger Hut. Sis had dumped us at the fly-infested rattrap so she could walk home with Randall Creighton, a handsome sophomore. Randall’s father ran a funeral home in Sloan County and reeked of formaldehyde and something else no one could put their finger on.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You think they were queer? Like Solomon?” Patience glances toward the open order window where a tall, skinny black man is sweating behind the griddle.
“Who knows?” I say, picking off the green, diseased tip of a French fry.
A resident of the Depot, the black community across the railroad tracks, Solomon Davidson was what I would later understand to be transgender, and not a very good one. Solomon always seemed to have thrown himself together at the last minute, with a floral print housedress gathered haphazardly about his neck, a black patent leather purse gaping open, or a scuffed pump missing a heel. No makeup, hat, or belt completed the ensemble, as if he dressed as a woman only as an afterthought.
It was probably this lack of specificity that saved him a great deal of ridicule. I’m still amazed Fat Gill Loper, a deacon at First Baptist, thought no more about hiring him than the man in the moon. And strangely enough, I can never recall someone lowering their window to yell an epithet in Solomon’s direction. Even Patience, the queen of yelling shit out of car windows, never yelled anything. The worst I’d ever heard about him was a rumor that he smashed out the raw hamburger patties by slipping them under his armpit. I’d always found this hard to believe, as did Patience, since she was now on her second paper-thin burger.
“Mama says the devil took part of Solomon’s mind, but I don’t know,” Patience says. “Mama thinks the devil took part of everybody’s mind, prob’ly even mine.”
I took another fry from the mound on the wax paper and wondered what Solomon would think about the horny trio we’d seen today. And I wondered, if he had the means, would he walk the streets of Jackson in the getups the drunken whore wore in the movie, or would he save it for his mirror at home where no one else could see?
* * *
The scent of sea water and creosote floods through the open windows of the Buick Electra 225. Six months after we moved, Garrett had traded in the old Buick for an even bigger one. Sis and I are catnapping in the back seat on our return from a Stalworth family reunion in Gulf Shores. The air is cool for late spring. My parents’ soft, sporadic thoughts on the day’s festivities break the monotony of the clunk clunk clunk of the Causeway Bridge below us.
“Do you think she had any idea?” Tina says to Garrett.
“Nah.”
“Do we know how long it was going on before she found out?”
“Before we found out what?” Sis, usually impossible to wake on a nighttime ride, sits up with a yawn and leans on the back of my father’s seat.
“Y’all go back to sleep,” Garrett says.
“What are we talking about?” I say. My mother has never held any family business away from her children. And it doesn’t take much prodding to get her to spill.
Tina turns her head in our direction. I can see the reflection of her profile in the lights of the Bankhead Tunnel straight ahead. “Amos is leaving Janis for his golf buddy. And, yes, his golf buddy is a man.”
“Tina…” Garrett acts like he’s going to reprimand her again, but leaves it at that.
Sis pulls herself closer to Tina. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not kidding you. And if there’s one thing you need to understand, it’s that the Stalworths don’t love like other people.”
“Honey…” Garrett draws it out, his last protest on the subject.
Inside the well-lit tunnel, it may as well be daylight. A Mack truck gets too close for Garrett’s comfort.
“Bastard,” Garrett says, blowing the horn.
“The men don’t just love men and the women don’t just love women.” Tina puts up the electric windows, an act that makes everything that follows seem even more earth-shattering. “Not your father, of course. But your great-aunt Frieda? Remember her?”
“Uh-huh,” Sis says, transfixed.
I still haven’t moved. I’m not sure I can.
“Caught with a minister’s wife at a women’s retreat.”
Sis looks at me and makes an “O” with her mouth.
“Your great-grandfather Stalworth?”
I’m not sure I can stand it.
“Hoooney…”
“Took up with a piano tuner named Eddie from Pike County after Flora passed. Aaand,” Tina says, raising a finger for effect, “he looked just like Clark Gable.”
“Okay,” Garrett says. “Story time’s over. You young’uns get some rest. School day’s gonna come mighty early.”
We all disappear into the pitch black as we leave the tunnel.
Sis pinches me on the leg. Leaning back in her seat, she faces me, her mouth in the shape of another O.
I turn myself away from her and look out the window. Underneath the lights of the state docks in the distance, I picture the ancient portrait of my great-grandfather that hangs in the hallway kissing Clark Gable. I am unable to shake the visual for days.