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Gigi, Jim, and I spent a lot of time at the Showstop, which was located right in the center of Gulf Town, not too far from the water. One afternoon when business was slow, Lonny, the owner, took advantage of the lull in action to sit down at the table with Gigi and me. “How are my two favorite girls?” he asked, tucking the corner of the damp rag he always carried into the waistband of his pants. No matter how much Lonny wiped the tables, polished the long surface of the bar, or shined the mirrored backsplash adorned with license plates from all over the country, the Showstop still retained a complicated smell—a beery yeastiness mixed with old smoke and ammonia—that a person only became accustomed to over time.
“Hey, Lola,” he said. “That’s Scratchy over there talking to Jim. Remember I was telling you about him?” Lonny jerked his chin toward the table where Jim had been shooting pool and was now engaged in conversation with a small, skinny man who had long black-and-gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. When I had told Lonny that I needed some real, legitimate documents with my actual name, Dolores Barnes, printed on them, he had said I should talk to a guy named Scratchy who lived a few hours inland.
“Gigi, baby,” Lonny said. “How many free drinks would it take for you to marry me?” He cupped her elbow, linking his arm through hers.
“You’re too good to me, Lonny.” Gigi patted his hand and looked away.
Lonny laughed, even as his eyes flashed with sadness.
“You’re too good to us all,” I told Lonny, slapping his knee to distract him from staring at Gigi.
“Scratchy’s a funny little guy. Why you want to talk to him?” Gigi asked, probably only to change the subject.
Missy wouldn’t stop. I knew it. Mrs. Schendel knew it too. The best I could do was to be prepared, and Scratchy could help me with that. He could get me identity documents for Dolores Barnes, make me be on paper the person I claimed to be in conversation.
Gigi leaned closer and half whispered, “I hear Scratchy shacks up with a black woman.”
“Well, the heart wants what it wants,” Lonny said. He stood up and wiped the table with his cleaning rag and then went back behind the bar to wash glasses. Gigi watched Lonny walk away, her eyes following him with such a degree of concentration that she looked as if she had been assigned the task of memorizing his movements.
“He keeps this place spotless ever since he took over for his father,” she said. “He fired Alfredo from the kitchen because he didn’t wash his hands enough.” Gigi glanced at my plate of French fries. “I hear the new guy is better, though.”
Jim placed his pool cue on the rack, then he and Scratchy walked over. Pressing his hands into my shoulders, Jim massaged me, working my bulk like bread dough. “Scratchy here’s saying we should drive out to his place.” Jim took a drink from my beer glass.
I smiled at Scratchy, but his attention was elsewhere, staring at the wall behind me. “Hey, is that you?” he asked, pointing at the photograph of me eating a giant bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. Lonny had asked to have that picture taken, making me feel like a minor celebrity. He had framed it with a sign that read Fat Ladies Love Our Food. I hadn’t expected to like the photograph as much as I did. I had even signed it Lola Rolls XOXO.
“In the flesh,” I told Scratchy.
After I finished my beer and food, Jim and I left for Scratchy’s, heading away from the gulf, down a network of smaller and smaller roads with stretching green swampland, part earth and part water, on either side. The sky had turned sunset pink by the time we reached Scratchy’s house, a peeling white building with a sagging covered porch extending along the front.
Once we were inside, Scratchy started talking about how to build an entire identity and create a new person. “It’s probably easier to do than you think.” We were sitting at his chrome-legged kitchen table, the surface of which, at least the parts that weren’t cluttered with dirty ashtrays and stacked newspapers, was a soft pearly white. “Most people don’t get their Social Security number until they get their first job. You got ladies who get married and never work, or at least not on the books, anyway, and you can get them a number anytime.” At this mention of ladies, Scratchy pointed at the back door. “Thelma should be home from the store any minute now, if one of the gators hasn’t got her.” It was hard to tell if he was serious or making a joke.
Scratchy and Jim went on to talk about the number of people they both knew, while my supposed part in our little party focused on waiting for another woman to show up and entertain me.
“Yeah, I had a good trick too,” I said, tired of being left out of the conversation. “I needed it to look like I was sending a letter from New York City, so I figured out how to do that.” Scratchy listened with great attention to my description of how I had arranged for Mrs. Schendel to receive a letter with a New York City postmark.
He sucked on his cigarette. “Yeah, that’s a good one. Completely aboveboard and hard to trace.” This praise from Scratchy, the way he nodded, how he appeared to weigh my words, made me feel like an equal sitting at the table.
Jim, however, scraped the legs of his chair against the linoleum as he shifted in his seat, tossing his cigarettes and Zippo lighter onto the table. The abruptness of his movements and the distinct metal ting of his lighter hitting the hard surface made me realize what I had done. Jim had told me not to contact Mrs. Schendel, and not only had I ignored that command, I had also disclosed my actions to another person. It was a relief, then, when Scratchy’s old lady, Thelma, walked in through the back door toting a bulging paper sack, a medium-sized caramel-colored dog with a white bib of fur and lopsided ears by her side.
“Hey, Tellie,” Scratchy said. “You know Jim, and this here’s Lola.”
Thelma stopped in her tracks when she saw me. Only her soft cloud of hair moved under the ceiling fan. She wore high-stacked platform sandals and deep-purple lipstick, an unlikely match to the plain-faced, skinny Scratchy. I struggled to get to my feet because it seemed like the sort of thing one should do. The certain taboo of a white man living with a black woman caused me to forget about my problem with Jim. When I smiled, the skin on my face felt hot and tight.
Thelma sucked in a deep breath. The grocery bag she hugged to her chest slipped a few inches before she recovered her grip on it. “Hey there,” she said at last.
The two of us stood frozen in place, studying each other for so long that Jim and Scratchy stopped talking to watch us. Then, in the same precise moment, Thelma and I burst out laughing. She put her paper sack down on the table while the two of us kept on going in that hysterical way that feeds on itself and fills your eyes with good tears.
“I made some pudding,” Thelma sputtered. “It’s butterscotch.”
And then Jim and Scratchy started laughing too. Thelma took a big glass bowl of butterscotch pudding from the refrigerator and put in on the table while I emptied the paper sack of its oversized bottles of beer and orange soda and a carton of unfiltered Camel cigarettes.
“So, you didn’t have no trouble then?” Scratchy asked Thelma.
Thelma was pulling down drinking glasses from a high kitchen shelf. She halted in the middle of that task at the sound of Scratchy’s voice, her back looking hard and solid, unbendable. “Nah. Just to the store and back. Besides, I had Useless with me.” Thelma nodded toward the brown-and-white dog resting his head on Scratchy’s knee.
“Some of the people in town where we go grocery shopping and buy gas don’t like me very much,” Scratchy explained as he rubbed Useless’s crooked one-up, one-down ears. “They get pissed off that I can earn money out here in the swamp, and they’re so poor they can’t even afford to pay attention.”
I laughed a little bit at Scratchy’s joke.
Thelma sat down across from Jim and me. “They hate us both,” she said. “Me for being black and him for shacking up with me. They’re going to burn down this damn house one day with us inside it.” Thelma’s matter-of-fact tone, at odds with the seriousness of her words, made me understand that she and Scratchy had been facing threats of harm for so long that a certain latent danger had become part of their daily lives.
“Hang on. I got something to show you all,” Scratchy said, breaking the spell. He left the kitchen and came back holding a mayonnaise jar with a clear liquid inside, which he explained was moonshine made by a second cousin in Tennessee. “This is some good shit,” he announced, passing around squatty jelly-jar glasses to all of us.
The first sip of moonshine was painful and horrible, but like so many things, I got used to it. That home-brewed liquor appeared powerful enough even to have rinsed away the hard edges of Jim’s anger. His body became more pliant as he drank, sinking down in his chair and then leaning over to kiss my neck. The alcohol blurred my earlier anxiety over Jim’s rage as well. Even though I suspected the topic of my contacting Mrs. Schendel would come up again later, it seemed less important than it had before we started drinking. I squeezed Jim’s leg under the table, liking the hard, sinewy feel of it.
“I ask you, Lola,” Scratchy said, “have you ever tasted anything like this hooch? It’s as clean as water. You can drink all you want, and tomorrow morning, you’ll wake up with your head as clear as a bell.”
Thelma slapped her legs then buried her face in her own lap, her whole back heaving with laughter until she was able to come up for air. “That’s a damn lie,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “That shit is so strong that Scratchy has to change the tops of the jars because the moonshine eats away the lining. It’s a fact.”
“Ah, Tellie here don’t know what she’s talking about. You listen to me, darlin’. You’ll see I’m right. You flying yet? Because this shit will give you some wings.” Scratchy poured some more of the moonshine into my glass. “You want an ice cube, you can have you an ice cube, but you can’t mix something as fine as this with anything else.”
The alcohol didn’t send me on an upward trajectory like Scratchy suggested. Rather, I experienced a type of spreading, a lateral, encompassing flow that pushed Jim’s previous displeasure and Thelma’s deadpan fear into some forgotten part of my mind, leaving space for me to be filled with a sense of warmth and well-being. “Jim,” I whispered in a loud voice, “come here. I have to tell you something.” Wrapping my arm around Jim’s neck, I pulled his head close to me. “I love you.”
Jim and I spent the night on a makeshift bed of pullout-couch mattress and pillows and made love on the floor in a pawing, jumbled drunken haze. I kept telling Jim that we had to be quiet, shushing him with such hissing vehemence that some drops of spit landed on his face, which only made me laugh more. When we were finished, I noticed that Scratchy and Thelma must have had the same idea, judging by the creaking bedsprings above us and the rhythmic thump of something, probably a headboard, hitting the wall. The pace of the banging increased then ceased with a final slam as Scratchy yelled loud and clear, “Save me, sweet baby Jesus.”
I had to press a pillow over my face because I couldn’t remember ever having heard anything even half as funny. Jim wiped tears from his eyes and struggled to catch his breath. “Scratchy’s daddy was a preacher,” he said.
“Poor baby Jesus—getting called upon at a time like this.”
When I laughed, a small throbbing kernel of pain, like bright light, pulsated behind my eye. “My head is killing me.” I pressed the heels of my hands against my temples and smacked my dry lips together.
Jim walked to the kitchen to wash his face and head in the sink, taking a squirt from the dish soap bottle on the counter and rubbing it on his chest and under his arms. I sifted through the linens and pillows on the floor to retrieve and reassemble my clothes, but bending down like that made my head pound, so I simply wrapped myself in the sheet and went to stand next to Jim. His body looked wet and slippery. The sleek freshness of his skin made my chest constrict.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I sent a letter to Mrs. Schendel,” I said because I had hated having that secret between us, and the grimness of my hangover notwithstanding, I was happy with how the party with Thelma and Scratchy appeared to have spurred a new intimacy between Jim and me, giving our relationship an everyday feel. “She’s the only mother I ever had.” When Jim didn’t respond, I tried to think what else I could say to convince him it had been a good idea to contact Mrs. Schendel. “Also, she wrote me with some really good information about what’s going on at home.”
Jim ceased his ablutions to stare at me. “How’s that? She wrote you a letter? Where did she send it?” The tap was still open. The water ran into the sink over the glasses we had drunk from last night. “Jesus Christ, Lola! Did you tell her where you are?”
“No, of course not,” I said, turning off the water because the sound of it only increased the feeling of panic rising in my chest. “I mean, not exactly. Paul helped me open a post office box so she could send me stuff.”
Jim stood motionless, his face expressionless. The eerie calm of his demeanor scared me a bit. “Do you mean Paul, the one who works at the Gulf Town Post Office? That Paul?” Jim took a deep breath, probably trying to remain calm. He wasn’t very successful. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Lola? Do you want the fucking police to find you? Is that what it is? Never mind that it’s my goddamn neck on the line too!”
I could feel myself shrinking away from Jim’s rage, hating my own fear, how it settled in the bottom of my stomach, stretching down into the backs of my legs to make them weak. “It’s not like that. She’s helping me by telling the sheriff I’m in New York City, and she even used bleach to clean the kitchen where my brother died. So nothing bad is going to happen because she would never tell anybody anything.” I pictured Mrs. Schendel sitting at the sewing bench in our old house, humming as she worked, keeping me company, making my family’s life better and more normal than it ever could have been without her. “If you knew her, you’d know she’s no rat.” The quiet conviction of my words soothed Jim somewhat. “I wish you could meet her,” I continued, talking to try to fix the situation. It made me sad as well to think that Mrs. Schendel and Jim would never know each other, never sit together at a table to talk and eat and drink—the before and after of my life joining together somehow.
Jim pulled a strand of paper towels from the roll sitting on the counter and started drying himself. “All right, I get it. I do. It’s just that now’s not the time for any trouble, you know? Goddamn Hinkle is running Midstate into the ground with his gambling. One season we’re running high, and the next we don’t even have enough money to pay people. Little Freddy and Ike are pissed off about one thing and another, and you got Gigi crying into her beer because she says she’s swallowed too many swords as it is.” Jim wrapped his arms around my shoulders. I dropped the thin sheet I’d been holding in front of myself so he could press against me, pushing me into the edge of the table, sliding it across the linoleum and into the wall. His naked body was damp from the water and perfumed from the dish soap.
“Hey, where you all get off to?” Scratchy called from the bottom of the stairs. “Ah, shit,” he said when he walked into the kitchen and saw the two of us naked and holding on to each other. “Will you look at that?” he said. “Damn, Jim, you got yourself a whole lotta woman there.”