This is a story about being in love with a man named Billy Lee Boaz, only he’s called Bisher, don’t ask me why. You need to know what he looks like because Bisher is a type, if men don’t recognize, at least the women will.
First, a Boaz is not big. Five foot six is about as tall as they get, and they are dark with black hair and eyes, real tanned skin, and bodies just as trim and tight as their lips are wet and loose. They have bandits’ faces, with bright shiny eyes that gleam in a dashboard’s light, white teeth that do the same, and they are as good in bed as they are at working on the engine of a Pontiac. They don’t do sports, except sometimes if the high school is small enough you’ll see them on the football line digging in like baby buffalo; stamina and spite keep them there against all odds. They usually aim their every action to rewards, and the mean variety end up in the service yelling at shaved-head recruits and being fussy over lockers. The civilian ones are good-natured boys, then men, who smile a lot. They are the kind who, when they come down to breakfast in clean white T-shirts and starched khaki pants, freshly showered and shaved, come smiling into the kitchen. Their hair is always cut the same, “some off the back and sides, just barely trim the top,” and around each ear is pared an arch the color of their palms, their soles, and underneath their underwear.
They’re jittery men too, jiggling change as they stand, walking forward lightly on their toes, slumping back hard into their heels, and somehow you are always aware of them from the navel down. Although they do nothing with their hands and arms to indicate their lower parts, still, the itch of lust is in the air. When they love you they are given to coming up and getting push-up placed with you against the wall; then they lean down to lick your throat. Before you gasp they unroll a pack of Luckies tucked like a second bicep in their shirt, and light one in a dramatic way: scratching the match against their thigh, snapping it in two with a nail, or deliberately letting the flame burn into their fingerpads. They are also the kind of men who groan when it feels good, and Bisher, who was my brother-in-law, had all these qualities.
But of course, finally, Bisher is different and that’s why I’m telling about him. Bisher was, and is, a genius. Everyone attests to that, even the principal who threw him out of school. Bisher works (where he has for years) at the Standard Shell station and wears a blue blouse with his name embroidered on his chest, an oval with a red satin stitch of Boaz, Bill right over his heart. He’s the one who taught me to call a work shirt a blouse. “More uniform,” he grinned, explaining that in the Army they call them blouses instead of shirts and “no one ever called dogfaces feminine.” Then he folded in the sides of cloth like wrappings on a gift and tucked them in his pants. That was the summer I was fifteen, and I sat on the shag rug listening to, watching, and admiring Bisher.
My sister Ellen married Bisher at the end of her junior year in high school, and there’s no need to go into what that did to our family. First, everyone almost died; then they cried from March to June, and finally, when my parents realized those two would not give up, they were wed under my father’s guiding prayers, and we all gave thanks that one of the two—probably Bisher—had the sense to hold off babies for a while. In towns like ours, as soon as a marriage was announced, countdown began. People bought layettes the same day they bought a plate for the bride’s table setting.
After a return from a honeymoon in “Gay Mehico,” Ellen and Bisher made our third floor home. The room had been ours—mine and Ellen’s, I mean—and was really two rooms with a long hall in between, a sink curtained off at one end and a toilet in a closet near the stair. “Deluxe,” Bisher said the day he moved in. “I’ll add this to my list of ten best spots to stay from here to Amarillo.” Ellen blushed to see him standing there amidst our pink stuffed bears and faded rag rugs. I moved reluctantly down to a room which was used once or twice a year for visiting missionaries, more often for making costumes for the church’s plays. With Bisher upstairs, our lives took on new rhythms and new ways.
My dad did not, of course, like Bisher, but being a Christian thought he should, and tried to talk to his new son-in-law each day. “Well, young man…” Dad would clear his throat. “Well, Billy Lee.”
“Call me Bisher, sir,” said Bisher. So Daddy would nod and ask, “Have a good day?”
“Yes, sir,” Bisher’d reply as snappy as an ensign in starched pants. Then he’d wink at me and purse his lips at Ellen, which made me giggle and her blush, then both snicker.
My mother always caught these three-way exchanges, saw us, her daughters, as traitors, and would draw her lips together and pale. She absolutely hated, detested, despised Billy Lee. She refused to call him Bisher, forbade our father to, cursed “that Boaz,” his family, his pets, and malign chance that put him here in this town when he should have been in Houston getting mugged. “Just trash,” she’d mutter, “nothing but trash. I never thought I’d raise my Ellen to marry trash.”
I would sit on a high stool in the kitchen waiting for Mamma to finish washing the dishes I was to dry, and listen to her tirades against Bisher, and wonder why he made her feel that way. “It’s lust, nothing but lust,” she’d said once, then flushed, slapped me on the arm right where I was picking a scab off a mosquito bite, and yelled at me to get upstairs to my room and stop hanging around minding everybody’s business, which I thought wasn’t fair. But as I moped my way to the room beneath the bed where Ellen and Bisher slept, I knew then, as now, that no matter what my mother said, I was on my sister’s side, and Bisher’s. And I also knew that I would love that short dark boy until the day I died.
Bisher was able, finally and always, to get around my mother as he got around everyone. He won her over in the end, for all the time she was dying the one person she ever wanted to see was him. “Where is that scamp?” she’d ask. “He worries me to death.” She’d pull at the collar of her bed jacket, push at her limp hair, and say, “I wouldn’t care to see him again.” The door’d creep open and Bisher’s face would appear, dark and shiny as mischief. “Got a minute, madame?” he’d whisper, letting his eyes look shyly everywhere except at her until she’d say, “Come on in, you’re letting air out to the hall.” Then Bisher’d slip into the room so quick if you didn’t know better you’d think he made his living as a second-story man, or maybe was a meter man gone bad and gone to bed with the lady of the house.
But like everybody else he touched, he touched our mother, made her do things she’d never dreamed of. He taught her to smoke on her deathbed. We could hear her gasp for breath and laugh between puffs and coughs. “Oh, Lord,” she’d say, or pray, with stammering breath, “This is so wrong,” and then peer closely at the end of her Camel to see if it would contradict. “Look here,” Bisher’d command, and she’d watch him fill the room with smoky rings. She learned that too. It was disconcerting to creak open the door to check and see if she was resting well and catch her lying there, propped up on ruffled pillows, head tilted back to the ceiling, her mouth a perfect “O” as it puffed out those rings until they circled her like Saturn’s do. Now I understand that that was one of Bisher’s secrets. He’s the kind of man who’ll take you to a raunchy honky-tonk if you want to go, and all night while you are sipping 3.2 beer his feet will be tapping yours under the table and he’ll be winking at you or nudging you as if to say, “Why aren’t you bad?” He let you play it fast, but safe, and you were grateful to him for it.
I wouldn’t say that Bisher’s what they call a good old boy. He’s not. At least, I don’t think he is. For although he works on cars and engines and loves them, he doesn’t care for guns. He has one, everybody does, but his hangs behind the door, forgotten as a worn-out coat. “I never liked hunting much,” he said one night in the kitchen when we were helping Mamma skin rabbits a church elder had brought. Dumped out of a gunny sack onto the floor, the rabbits filled the room with their blood-splotched fur. Ellen, pregnant with her first, ran to throw up; Mamma murmured, “Oh, Lord,” and even Daddy, who preached of death as a new beginning, looked distressed.
“Let’s make them look like meat,” Bisher said, “then they won’t trouble us as much.” He heaped them in a plastic tub where they hung limp as coronation trim to be sewed on, then took them to the porch. After they were skinned and all the leavings but their lucky feet buried, they bubbled pale and shimmering in a black iron pot.
“No, I never cared for hunting,” Bisher said thoughtfully when all that had been done. “Because I always thought just before I shot…” He paused, looked apologetically at my father. “What if it’s true we’re born again, and in another body, say, like a deer? Why, I couldn’t shoot a deer to save my life, cause every time I’d remember Lewis Moon and how he liked to run before he died. Why, what if Lewis was that deer? Excuse me, sir.”
My daddy muttered, “Quite all right,” and hurried out to write up a lesson for the Senior Sunday School with two main themes—Number 1: Do we need to hunt our animal friends? and Number 2: Beliefs on coming back to life that Christians should put right on out of their heads.
But what made Bisher unique was that he was a genius, and how he got to be one is legend in our town. Others have tried his trick since, just to end up laughingstocks when they have failed. There has been only one other acknowledged genius in this whole county, and George Shapland was never any fun like Bisher. He was always tucked up in a book, which Bisher said proved he wasn’t a natural genius. “Not that there is a thing wrong with books. It’s just that they don’t have no place.” George graduated from high school at age fifteen after having proved the geometry teacher wrong and having put the history teacher down (both were coaches, so shouldn’t be blamed for being soft in hard subjects), and then he went to State Tech where he took a double load of everything and made friends with others like himself who cluttered up cafeteria tables with maps and measuring instruments. Later it was rumored he became a monk. But Bisher’s genius wasn’t like George’s ordinary kind, for Bisher’s brain was pure, and how he brought it to the attention of the authorities was genius enough.
A new teacher came to teach English and the Romance tongues, and one week into French, Bisher’s genius was revealed. Called on to read a page of Lesson II, he balked at his desk, slumped into his heels, and said in French he’d rather not. The rest of the students didn’t know what he said, thought it was filth and that that was why the teacher gasped and said, “You read it, you canard.” When Bisher quacked and waddled to the front, the others didn’t know what was going on. They now thought Bisher was making bathroom gestures, sounds. He jumped on the teacher’s desk; then, barely looking at the text, he read Lesson II, skipped on to IV, ending up with number XII, and he answered all the questions too. The other students still thought he was Danny Kaye-ing them, making Frenchy sounds, making fun of French, so they were laughing at his ooo la la’s, but meanwhile the teacher had caught on to Bisher’s brain and stood there listening to him reel off syllables like de Gaulle.
When Bisher finished a rundown of the hardest, longest words in the index, translating all of them, a silence fell upon the room. “Is he right?” whispered a semibright boy, and the teacher numbly nodded her head. When she did, Bisher, who was still standing on the desk, now holding the book across his chest in a Napoleon stance, suddenly, without a sideways glance, hurled that text out the window, splintering the glass. At the crash, he jumped to flee the room, the teacher in pursuit, screaming “My boy, my boy, my dear dear boy” in French.
Bisher got kicked out of school about ten minutes later, even though the teacher intervened, claiming (it was the first time) Bisher’s genius. The principal would hear none of this. “Don’t let me hear of this boy’s genius. I call it fits myself. There’s at least ten idiots in the institute can reel off dates and times better than this Billy Lee ‘Bisher’ Boaz boy. And as for this last—this French episode—why, I don’t know.” He shook his hands from the wrist as if that limpness signified Paris and all its decadence. Then he threw Bisher out, saying the reasons were breaking windows and the backs of books and disrespect for a foreign land.
Once expelled, Bisher was stripped not only of the lessons he already knew, but of all the offices he held, which, though many, were not various. He was the sergeant at arms for every club from Future Nurses to the Lindbergh Boys. He had more pictures in the Cattle Call annual than anybody but the Snowball Queen, but that year he was officially excised, and every organization picture had an oblong blank that once was Billy Lee. He signed those anyway with Greek signs.
The second reason he was a genius was inside dope. What that means is that Bisher knew something about everything—he really did. Like all smart men, he claimed to have read the dictionary from A to Z, and was always threatening to start in on the Britannica. In every conversation Bisher had things to add, and always they were interesting. He was like those columns in the newspaper called “Ask Mr. Tweedles” where people write in to ask “What are warts made of?” and “Why are tulips bulbs?” That is what Bisher Boaz could do too—not only explain warts in scientific terms, he could tell you about all the different kinds of warts, from plantars on your feet to venereal on your you-know-where. But, unlike a Tweedles, who had to stop at column’s end, Bisher didn’t. If you showed the slightest bit of interest, as I did, since my hands were always covered with warts—seed pearls of them ringing my fingers, grits of them on my fingertips—he’d tell you how to make them go away. Every night press half an onion and some lemon juice on your palms, then put your hands in gloves so the acid would start to eat away those knobs. Salt and hot water rags might work, but not as well, and he’d heard from a sailor that in Madagascar the natives called warts “woolies” and smeared them with cornmeal and lard and exposed them to the sun. “Are you sure, Billy Lee,” my mamma questioned, “he didn’t get that mixed up with cooking techniques?”
“No, ma’am,” said Bisher, “no siree. And Old Man Allison—he spits on pennies, then ties them to your hands.” I shivered to think of wet copper staining my hands green, melting my flesh.
But warts were just one of the things that Bisher knew, could do. For instance, he knew names, real names of movie stars—Bernie Schwartz for Tony Curtis, Judy Garland/Frances Gumm. “Archie Leach, now that’s a laugh,” he’d say. “Imagine, Cary Grant!” He knew the made-up names of every level down to grip, and watching a movie with Bisher could be a chore. “Bobby Raymond’s his real name,” he’d whisper when the villain appeared; “Hers is Susie Moore,” when the girlish victim smiled at death. “Oh boy,” he’d crow, then clap his hands. “Old Lyman Harkney’s playing that soda jerk.” And even when the story was spoiled by these outbursts, you didn’t mind, but wanted to see old Harkney make a comeback shake. You wanted to know Norma Jean Baker by her real name, even when Bisher would argue against that change. “Now why?” he’d say. “Norma Baker is a good star’s name. Norma Talmadge made it. Baker sounds so clean, so why’d she change? Brought her nothing but bad luck, poor kid. Did you know she had a round white bed?” He knew political nicknames too, and was the first person I ever knew to call FDR “Frankie Dee.” Bisher said, “His own family did that in the confines of their room. The missus, that’s Eleanor, I’ve heard she called him F. Dee Dee.”
And Bisher knew the names of things like knots. He never tied a shoelace, his or his kids’, without telling you just what it was: half-splice, granny circle, mariner’s wheel, whichever one he’d chosen for that day. Once he macrameed his oldest boy’s laces halfway down, naming each loop and twist as he taught the child to tie. It was the same with ties. “Windsor, Crown, Full-Dress, or Brummel Bunch,” he’d say, and later, when my dad was old and unable to sort out the ends of his own, Bisher was always there on Sunday mornings “to arrange cravats.” “A Fanchon Loop?” he’d ask. My dad would nod, then watch in the mirror as Bisher, shorter, hidden behind him, deftly moved the material into wings.
Names of tools, nails, brads, a half-lug screw, a soft-headed angle iron—all these are in my memory, along with others I never try to find in hardware stores. All are inside dope and fun to know. You can see why children always loved him, wanted to go with him to the Dairy Queen to hear him order “Dope and Dodos two by two” or “Adam and Eve on a raft with a side of down.” My daughter loves her hamburgers “dragged through the garden,” and she’ll eat almost anything if Uncle Bisher says it is “a meal with a story behind it.”
I am married to a man who is as different from a Bisher Boaz as any man can be. My Mel is tall, lean, pale, wears wire-rimmed glasses, and is a chemist with hair thinning at the crown. He was appalled at tales of Bisher until he met him, then fell under his spell as hard as anyone. When those two are together I love my Mel more as he tries to slouch his frame down half a foot and bounce tough in Bisher’s stride. It can’t be done, but I love him for the trying.
Bisher knows what he’s about with Mel, teasing, making frogs on my husband’s arm, and laughing, scuffling out a foot to kick Mel in the rear. “Break your behind, my old Max. You ain’t nothing but a hoked-up cook.” He nicknamed Mel “Max” the second day they met. Because, he said, Mel had “the look of Maximilian Schell, or the Emperor of Mexico.” My husband, immensely pleased, laughed, betrayed himself with a blush. He’s wanted a nickname all his life, not just Mel; a shortened version of your name is not enough. Years ago, at a summer camp, he’d tried to start a nickname of his own. Tall and awkward at first base, he’d chatted up his teammates, addressed himself as “Stumpy,” encouraged the others to do the same, but Stumpy didn’t stick. Until Bisher’s baptism, my Mel remained just what he was, a two-syllable Jewish boy good at math and “chemicals.” As “Max” he expands in blue jeans that fit rather than cling oddly to his waist, and the whole of him is revved up by Bisher. He’s sparked. He starts making lists and listing things as “Number 1.”
Oh, Bisher’s lists… he has one for everything: ten famous redheads, five deadly Arizona snakes. When my daughter squeals, tumbles backwards on the grass, hurling her legs over her head to show cotton bloomers with a ruffled hem, I know if Bisher were here he’d have her on a list. “Want to hear a list of five famous women who showed their private pants in public places? Number 1: Marilyn Monroe on a hot-air grate in New York City, 1956.” And the names remain, for Bisher nicknamed everyone. Ellen had a dozen or more, but “Mistress Mellow” was the one she liked the best. I was “Grits” because “You love ’em, you’re full of ’em, and your warts feel like ’em.” Far from being insulted, I loved that name, signed “Grits” to papers until I was married. My mother was “Miz Matty Mustard,” my dad was “Mr. Chaps.” Every friend that Bisher had was changed, renamed. Frail Danny Sells became “Dan, the Panic Man” who tried feats like hanging from a window ledge at noon, while C. C. Collins, a druggist in his daddy’s store, was called “Chuckles Capistrano, that fine chap,” and he grew to specialize in oily giggling. Bisher had nicknames for every pet he met. “Here, Wolf,” he’d coax and our old collie Fred would try to growl, and then he’d croon, “Hey, Big Rufus Red,” as he stroked our orange striped tomcat Sam.
But what I always loved the best was to listen to Bisher talk about all the places that he’d like to have been. He knew those nicknames too, and the way that the natives said them, like New-pert News and San Antone. I loved the ones that ended in a liquid a: Miama, Cincinnata, Missoura, or when he’d give you a choice of pronunciation, say between Nawlans and New Orleens. My favorites always were the “Sans”: Peedro, San Jo, Frisco, San Berdoo.
I have often wondered what it would be like to make love to Bisher, or one of his type, and even, on occasion, have worked myself into a frenzy over this. In those early days I watched Ellen with a discerning eye that only sisters have, to see if what she and Bisher did “showed.” On her it did. She was and is a woman who is lush, not fat but full, and her skin glows. A man would have to want those deep wide breasts, those soft round thighs that show you she’s a natural blonde. Sometimes I wonder who it was I envied most: Bisher, sinking into her to be subsumed, or Ellen, having him with all life’s energy.
But for all my dreaming I am aware that Ellen’s not had an easy time of it with Bisher being like he is. It’s a funny thing that there are men who zero in on a woman they want, as the only thing in life they’ll ever want, and once they’ve gotten her, they start to roam. My husband sees Bisher’s episodes as excess energy or misdirected compassion—Bisher’s attempts to help some poor girl out. Beginning with advice, he always ends up in bed.
Ellen realizes that these lapses don’t mean anything, that she is secure in her position of Number 1. The problem is that it still hurts. She cries her eyes out over each new blonde, and each year I settle down to write a letter telling her that once again all will be well, that Bisher will behave, realize the error of his ways, not to pack her bags and move out here to us, not to storm the honky-tonk, not, whatever else she does, to go to the hussy’s house to fight it out with her. Above all, I write, just be calm, you’ve been through this before. Take up guitar, I urge. You’ve always had a pretty voice, you like to sing, Bisher likes to hear you sing (not that that matters, I say with an exclamation mark), and that will turn your thoughts away from what is going on at Ruby’s Watering Hole. Just get through it, Ellen, one more time. You know you are his everything. And all my love. Then, because I know Bisher would be hurt—and, oddly enough, so would Ellen if I left it out—I add, P.S. Give our love to Bisher but hold off giving it to him for a while.
It always seemed to me that the love story of my sister and Bisher should have high drama in it: a shooting outside the Broken Spoke with Boaz slumping down, wounded in a limb, to be lifted into the back of a pickup truck and jolted into town to have the lead removed. I’ve pictured that scene a thousand times: Ellen in a cotton dress, shivering in the air-conditioned corridor, waiting for a word about her man, and, at the other end of that linoleumed aisle, a swinging door behind which sits the hussy who has caused it all. She’s a brassy blonde wearing stretch pants and patent go-go boots, but close up, to complicate things, her eyes are tired and vulnerable. It would be her ex-husband, released from Huntsville on a 2–10, who shot Bisher down, and that man’s now cuffed and crying in the city jail.
But even as good a character as Boaz was, he couldn’t make his fate a better story, and I always find the ending sad, the way it petered out. Finally, it was just what you’d expect of anyone—not a Bisher Boaz genius with all his sweet teenaged love. It was one blonde too many, and too trashy, and then it wasn’t bearable any more. Ellen couldn’t laugh, as she’d once done, at the tales of woe they’d tell Bisher and he’d repeat to her as to why he’d got involved. Although he’d hardly aged, had stayed almost as trim as his boyhood self, he was older now and should know better. He should think of the kids, be more considerate of her. By now Ellen was wider, heavier, her tolerance covered over by both knowledge and flesh. So they were divorced, like one out of every four, and within the year my sister married a widower, a vet who wore pastel polyester leisure suits and had chains dangling on his exposed chest (he is another type who deserves a story of his own). But he seems to love Ellen about as much as he does Samoyeds, and she seems quite content. As for Bisher, within a month he’d married his latest blonde craze, who promptly hung up her dancing pumps, let her hair go brown, and started in making meringue pies with too much tartar in the gelatin.
On our first visit home since the divorce, Mel said he wanted to go see Bisher and I could come if I thought Ellen wouldn’t mind, but he meant to go anyway. At breakfast Ellen said she didn’t mind, that she saw Bisher almost every day or so to discuss the kids, or just to talk. Pouring coffee for us, she flushed, glanced at the empty place where the vet would sit except he had to attend the birth of puppies, and said, “You know that Bisher. He’s always got the inside dope on everyone.”
We drove out to see Bisher at his station, and I stayed in the car because it was so hot out there on the concrete where Mel and my ex-brother-in-law were sparring, making plans to go fishing on the coming Saturday. Then, suddenly, Bisher was walking over to the car. Smiling, he leaned into the window frame and said, “Give me a kiss, sweet Grits,” and offered me his sweet wet lips. I inhaled that old smell of him: sweat and nicotine and gasoline and the lotion of Old Spice and Lava soap, and began to cry. “Oh Bish,” I blubbered, and he said, “Now, Grits, don’t cry.” As he massaged my shoulder blade, I heard him say, “Got a brand-new list of five dark men who married blondes and then went wrong. Number 1: Joe DiMaggio.” Then we three laughed. That night in bed beside Mel, knowing Ellen and her new man, whose hands smell of Lysol and dog hair, are down the hall, I wondered again of sex and love and Bisher. How can she bear it? I thought. To know somewhere not far away he is in bed, in love with someone else who listens to his whispering of names like Frisco, Nawlins, San Berdoo?
Leaving town, we swung by the station to beep good-bye to Bisher. As we honked, drove off, and left him standing on the platform next to the pumps, I saw he didn’t wave.
“The Arapahoe Indians invented waving bye—did it backwards to their own faces” was the first piece of inside dope he’d ever told me. And so Bisher never waved good-bye. Instead he bobbed his head. Now, this morning, he nodded us away, as if to say it was his energy that moved the engines of our lives.