Holly and I backtracked a couple of miles to Lewisburg, a little historic hot spot of a town, where by my count there were 437 craft and antique shoppes within its charming four-block commercial district. Bypassing the Blue Moon Cafe, which described its luncheon experience on a chalkboard out front, we ate down-home blue-plate specials upon a rickety table by a greasy window at the locals’ favorite restaurant I had previously discovered, named Klingman’s Meat Market, which was a former, well, meat market.
At Klingman’s Meat Market, you placed your order at a little counter in back by pointing out your pleasure in the huge pots of stuff cooking relentlessly on stoves in a tiny closet of a kitchen, anything anyway that looked good from the doorway. After the polite if stolid church-ladies piled your plate until it overflowed, you paid up front at an ancient contraption of a cash register, where Gwen Klingman herself, a wisecracking, bent little old historic bird of a lady, charged a flat $2.95 for that dripping platter of grub you had to carry with two hands.
All the conversation among the loafing, coffee-slurping old coots sitting around the dining room out front centered upon the ongoing trial of the Six-Foot-Tall Attacker Beauty Queen, who, in late January of the previous year, the day after she had relinquished her Miss Williamsport crown at a pageant during which she sang their song, “The Power of Love,” with tears streaming down her face, directed at his vacant auditorium seat, the Attacker Beauty Queen had arrived in Lewisburg armed with a 9mm pistol, a butcher’s knife, a claw hammer, a syringe, lighter fluid, a box of matches, and rubber gloves, entertaining the notion of murdering her faithless lover, her pregnant rival, and whomever else got in her way. The person who ended up getting in the Attacker Beauty Queen’s way was her pregnant rival’s dad. He had answered the door when the Attacker Beauty Queen knocked to request the use of the phone, claiming her car had broken down. Unfortunately for the Attacker Beauty Queen, her pregnant rival’s dad happened to be a high school wrestling coach and former Secret Service Agent. Only a stunned heartbeat after she had clobbered him in the head from behind with a hammer, the pregnant rival’s dad had subdued the Attacker Beauty Queen. He held her on the kitchen floor in a full nelson until the police arrived, whereupon the Attacker Beauty Queen had made comments such as: “The only thing I wanted to do was fuck up his car,” and “I know I’ve ruined my life, and I’ll get counseling if you-all think I should.”
I knew all about this Attacker Beauty Queen business because I had driven over to Lewisburg from Billville when the trial started in order to check her out. The day I drove over, the Attacker Beauty Queen, wearing a simple all-white tunic suit-dress, had entered the courthouse with her lovely six-foot-tall blond head held high. As I was telling Holly the story, it dawned on me that the cad who had caused it all, that rat of romance, that two-timing, low-life, scumbag bullshitter ladies’ man, might put Holly in mind of me, so I hurried to change the subject. I informed Holly that the trial was the most historic event to hit this quaint little town since the Battle of Lewisburg on May 23, 1862, when the Yankee forces under General George Crook, later famous as the captor of Geronimo, routed the local favorite Johnny Rebs.
Sticking to that Civil War subject, after lunch I drove Holly up to the old Confederate Cemetery on McElhenney Road at the edge of town. The mass grave was a large, cross-shaped mound that contained the remains of 95 unknown Confederate soldiers who were killed in the battle of Lewisburg or died of wounds thereafter. The mound was on a lovely bluff overlooking the valley and town below. It was surrounded by a rusting iron fence and a peaceful stand of old shade trees.
A strange thing occurred the day that Holly and I were there. I had attempted to take a picture of the cross-shaped mound, but I couldn’t get my Polaroid camera to work right. So I threw the wretched contraption on the ground. Dumb, fucken twentieth century and the technology it rode in on, was my attitude. Holly picked up the cheap-ass camera and easily shot a picture of the mound. Dumb, fucken twentieth century, I opined, as we strolled back down the grassy path under the trees to the road. By the time we reached the Red Ride, the Polaroid pie was done to a turn.
Holly’s photograph of the cross-shaped mound was a perfect composition, balanced and clear and quietly dramatic. With her artist’s eye, she had captured the hazy slants of late afternoon light through the trees wonderfully too. She had captured the peace and quiet and old sadness of the place. But what we couldn’t figure out, as we studied that picture, was this green effusia, this faint misty stuff that seemed to float above parts of the earthen cross like green gas, and which curled up into the air in places like the green, smoky shapes of—what? Men? Soldiers? And here and there in the green vapor were tiny yellow lights, like fireflies in the dusk under the shade of summer trees. It was clear to me immediately that Holly had just photographed the green ghosts of the Confederate dead. Holly could do things like that, psychic stuff, and her amazing flashes of intuitive insight kept me edgy. But there it was, a photograph that as far as I was concerned proved conclusively that there was some form of life after death for the unknown Confederate dead, albeit greenish in nature and gassy.
That night back at Grandma Pearl’s house in Billville, I made a big bowl of buttered popcorn while Holly got into her blue flannel pajamas with the cute pink piggies on them. Those pajamas were so big and floppy on her that Holly had to roll up the pant cuffs and sleeves. I put on a video, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and we cuddled on the couch. We were both dead-tired but wired and happy. Holly loved the movie. It was funny and sexy and it had a happy ending. We fed each other buttered popcorn and then licked each other’s greasy fingers while we talked about our day and the movie. In the movie, Hugh Grant played this bumbling but sweet young Englishman who fell in love with a gorgeous American girl played by Andie MacDowell, who had had over forty lovers as compared to his six or seven. In one funny scene, she counted her lovers off one by one with little sexual anecdotes about each one while Hugh’s eyes got as wide and shiny as hubcaps. Their love affair seemed star-crossed at first, but after a series of touching, amusing mishaps, they ended up together, as they were clearly destined to do.
Are we going to have a happy ending? Holly asked me as I picked her up from the couch and carried her to bed. You can take it to the bank, I said and kissed her cheek and forehead and eyes. Holly snuggled up tighter to me and buried her face in my neck. The soft feel and fresh smell of those floppy flannel pajamas with the little pink piggies on them was like all of outdoors on a fall day. And that appley smell of Holly’s hair, and the fragrance of her warm, sleepy skin made me gasp with desire and gratitude.
Holly nestled up against me and sighed and idly played with the gray brillo on my old chest. Holly was smart and strong and determined and brave, and she had all of life before her. The future was Holly’s to capture in a mason jar like a firefly and watch blink. I lay there in the dark holding that lovely, sweet-smelling girl and I felt old and beaten down by my own devices, all that same sad, sappy, retro old-fart business.
—Are you sure you don’t call your wife morning, noon, and night? Holly asked, and I answered that question with as much truth as I was capable. —And you don’t know who hung up when I answered the phone last night? Holly asked, almost too sleepy thankfully to hear what I didn’t say. —It’s too bad your sister is out of town this weekend, Holly mumbled, —I really wanted to meet her. —I hope our love story, Holly said and pressed against me tighter, —has a friggin happy ending. Slowly caressing Holly’s face with my fingertips, I whispered, —I know.
We lay there while Holly sleepily speculated about what our darling baby would look like. She wanted a boy first for us. She wanted my son to have my eyes, which she called teal, a sort of smoky, whiskey color, she said. (In truth, my eyes are the color of mud.) Holly wanted my son to have my nose and my (sagging) jawline, she said. What if, I asked, he’s born with a graying mustache and a dick that creaked like a swing? Holly ignored me. Holly began spewing names. She rattled off dozens she had turned over in her mind late at night when she couldn’t sleep. I had already told her that I would never name a kid after myself, as my old man had done to me, with all those ancient Spanish middle names that had somehow sailed down through generations of my basically Black German family, as though I was some chip off the old bullshit block. Holly still argued about this, but that night she ranged all over the place in the name department, until finally she somehow cuddled even closer against my old bones and began to drift off to sleep whispering the names of unborn boys warmly against my neck. —What about Elvis? I said. —I’d like to name the little sonofabitch Elvis. But Holly was asleep.
Holly always said I was too romantic for my own good, but that wasn’t the truth. In my life, I have seen no romantic love that ever endured. When it came to romantic love, I finally harbored only dark ironies. Some day, if we were still together, Holly would roll over and wonder who was that old goat in bed beside her in the fresh bright light of the morning, and how had that old goat got there, and what was she, a steadfast and basically good girl, to do with him? Better to break your own old heart at a point you hoped you wouldn’t die from it, was my basic philosophy, even if that meant giving Holly’s own dear heart its tiny seizure. Holly was not a girl to linger in pain and self-pity. Holly was a girl who would not look back for long. Holly slammed doors behind her, and burned bridges. One of the names Holly conjured could well be the name of another son she would bear someday, but it would not be my son, for that son would never be born.
Trying not to disturb Holly, I reached over to turn off the bedside lamp. The Polaroid pictures we had shot that day were stacked on the
bedside table. I flipped through them. I studied the photograph Holly had taken of the green gassy ghosts of the unknown Confederate dead in the lamp’s soft light. I thought that it was the saddest picture I had ever seen. I could really identify with the unknown Confederate dead.
After we had made our perfect clean getaway from the Greenbrier.