6
“Hey, darlin’, is that you?”
“What’s become of me is what this is.”
“Stop it, Lula, you look terrific. It’s me who’s gone from bein’ Miss Grape to Miss Raisin. Let me see if you still got a butt.”
Beany Thorn took hold of Lula and turned her around.
“Don’t that beat hell, honey, you do!”
Lula giggled. “Hush, Beany, people’ll hear.”
“Girl, they ought to see! You’d win the Miss Octogenarian of North Carolina contest, if they had one. Do they?”
“Stop it, baby, I’m awful glad to see you, too.”
The two women hugged. Beany Thorn picked up her one little fake alligator bag that her daddy, Deacon Don Thorn, had given her on her seventeenth birthday, two days before she’d been packed off to Oriental the first time.
As they began walking away from the train platform, Lula asked, “That all you brought?”
“For a person who might not make it past today, it’s enough. As Saint Scarlett O’Hara said, ‘Tomorrow is another day, so let’s worry about it when and if it gets here.’ ”
Once they were settled in wicker rockers on the wraparound porch of Dal’s house—Lula insisted on calling it that even after Mrs. Delahoussaye’s passing—each with a chimney in hand filled with crushed ice, Bombay gin and a teaspoonful of sugar, the two lifelong friends appraised one another more carefully.
“Take a sip, Beany, it’ll cool you down.”
Beany did, then said, “Lula, you’re really more than a friend deserves—you remembered my fondness for Bombay.”
“Bought a bottle just because you were comin’, though I have to say I don’t mind it myself.”
“Happy days!” declared Beany, holding up her glass.
“Happy days!” Lula repeated.
“Look at us, Lula, two old biddies no use to nobody.”
“At least we ain’t pollutin’ the planet. Not too much, anyway. We don’t drive SUVs or use tampons.”
“Lula, you ever think about sex?”
“My land, Beany! Thank the Good Lord, no.”
“I must confess, sweetie, I do. Not that I want it, necessarily. After all, I’m dry as a bone. But the thought of havin’ a man’s big old hairy arms around me comes on now and again. I even have orgasms in my dreams.”
Lula gagged on a large swallow of ice cold gin.
“Beany, after all these years you still terrify me.”
“Saw a young man in the Wal-Mart the other day—Tuesday, I guess it was—wearin’ a sweatstained wifebeater made me tremble. I swear I coulda sucked on him like a Holloway All-Day. Don’t tell me you don’t have them thoughts even once in a while.”
“Beany, I don’t want to talk about it. No, in fact. I told you.”
Beany ran her tongue over her lips, savoring the flavor of the Bombay gin and sugar, and said, “I got to keep alive in my mind the possibility that I got at least one more romantic episode comin’ my way.”
“I heard the most terrible thing on the radio last night,” said Lula. “You know I can’t sleep more than three or four hours, so I listen to the radio in the night.”
“I ain’t slept more than four hours at a crack since I was twelve, Lula. Ever since I figured out I’d be takin’ the Big Dirt Nap someday. Didn’t want to miss nothin’ before then.”
“Heard that the French fella was always explorin’ the waters of the world—can’t recall his name, somethin’ like Crusoe only his first name weren’t Robinson, he’s dead now—was in a submarine at the bottom of Lake Tahoe in California, and discovered the bodies of a hundred or more Chinese men frozen intact. Turns out these men had been workin’ a job out there in about the year 1900 and thought they were bein’ taken to the other side of the lake after their job was finished.”
“Did the boat go down in a storm?”
“Uh uh. The terrible part is that the bosses didn’t want to pay ’em, so they clubbed all them poor little Chinese men and boys and threw their bodies overboard. The lake is super deep and frozen at the bottom, which is why the corpses is all preserved.”
“Did the French guy fish out the bodies?”
“Crusoe said it was too horrible and people couldn’t deal with it, so he left ’em there. Ain’t that the most horrifyin’ thing?”
Beany nodded and drank down the contents of her glass.
“Sounds like somethin’ Elmo’s partner Emilio Zarzoso mighta done. Remember him, Lula? The one who did twenty years for murderin’ his wife with a poisonous viper he claimed was an exotic pet escaped from its cage?”
Lula finished off her drink and said, “Time for another sugar gin, Beany, don’t you think?”