Marsha Hunt - Joy

‘Where’s that supposed to be,’ I said, asking a question I didn’t much need a answer to ’cause the ‘where’ wasn’t half as important as the ‘how’ of Joy dying.

‘In the mountains above Sante Fe, that’s why I got on to the Santa Fe police department.’

‘Now I realize that you didn’t know nothing much about Joy, but I can set you straight on one thing. She had enough energy to bury Hitler’s army, and I find it completely impossible to believe that she died from playing no tennis. She took good care of her body. Ate right … used to drive me half crazy reading them food packages before she’d eat something that wasn’t fresh. Exercised. Jogged most every day since she turned thirty, so it don’t make a blind bit of sense that she’d of dropped dead playing no tennis. I refuse to believe it, and if I had the money I’d be right on the plane to see what done happened for real.’

‘I’ve spoken to the coroner himself, and I didn’ get the impression that anything happened other than what he told me which is that Joy was having a tennis lesson, and in the middle of a serve she fell to the ground, in a way that made the tennis instructor first think she’d had a bad cramp. But when Joy didn’ get up and seemed to have a convulsion, this girl that was teaching her called for an ambulance. But Joy was dead before it got to her. Massive coronary is the verdict, and while I can understand that both you and her mother find it unbelievable, it sounded like the truth to me. Why would the coroner have a reason to lie? Joy was nothing to him.’

Just like my mind had told me from the first I heard Jesse’s voice, he wasn’t the person that should of been telling me none of this, ’cause he didn’t have no special feeling for Joy. I could hear that in his voice. It was Tammy I wanted to be speaking to and I asked him to get her.

‘I told you Baby Palatine that she’s asleep, and with that sedative that I gave her, there’s no way in the world that I could get her to come to the phone now. She couldn’t make any sense if she did anyway,’ Jesse added.

The idea that Joy was laying somewhere dead with nobody with her made me feel sick, and I wanted to talk to Tammy to find out how Rex Hightower figured in it.

‘What the hell is Tammy doing in the bed if her child is dead,’ I asked Jesse. That second I got over feeling sad ’cause the thought of Tammy laying in the bed while Joy was laying in a morgue made me so mad.

All the time I knew her, Tammy’d been so concerned with how she was feeling that she didn’t never let them girls of hers come first. Not even Anndora for all the fuss Tammy made about her. Tammy’s girls didn’t get raised. They just drug themselves up once she got to feeling sorry for herself after Dagwood left in ’56 … maybe it was ’57 … I ain’t never been good on dates, but Freddie B probably can remember exactly, ’cause it was the same year the Yankees lost the world series and he’d bet on ’em. Whatever year it was, I did what any Christian would and didn’t let them girls run wild. As Freddie B and me couldn’t have none of our own, it suited me. But like my baby sister said at the time, that wasn’t the point. True enough, it’s the mama who’s s’posed to take time to mother, but if’n it hadn’t of been for me and Freddie B ain’t no telling what would have happened to them. ’cause from the time Dagwood walked out, Tammy stopped caring about everything, and her kids was the first on the list to go.

But it was real obvious me and this new husband of Tammy’s didn’t see eye to eye about what her duties was supposed to be, ’cause Jesse said, in answer to my question about why she was in bed, ‘There’s not a lot Tammy can do from here, Baby Palatine. Her sitting when she’s exhausted won’t bring Joy back and since Santa Fe will be shut down until nine a.m., she can’t even go ahead organizing the funeral.’

Tammy was probably the last person Joy would have wanted doing that, but how could I tell him as much.

‘You got Brenda’s number?’ I asked him, ’cause I would of rather talked to her than him, since he sounded like Tammy probably had him hoodwinked into thinking that she was suffering. She was good at that. Even I fell for it for a time after Dagwood left and Tammy took to her bed surrounded by any kind of bottle that was made – from hot water bottle to pill bottle to whiskey bottle, though I’d be lying if I said she ever became a alcoholic. But she might as well have been since she stayed in the bed for months with me waiting her hand and foot till I got fed up and stopped bringing her in food, although I kept up fixing meals for them children. Though I have to say Brenda and Joy did a lot for theyselves. And for Anndora.

‘Brenda’s phone’s been disconnected,’ Jesse said.

‘Again!’

‘Yes again,’ he sighed. ‘Her girlfriend Latrice moved to Phoenix for six months for some job training scheme with the Federal Government and Brenda’d run up a big seven hundred dollar phone bill calling her every night.’

‘Seven hundred dollars!’

Joy had told me that Brenda had taken up with a new woman but I was only half listening to her when she said it, because Brenda’d been through so many women it didn’t seem worth taking in the details about her latest at the time, since I’d had enough about Brenda and women from the first she let it out. In fact, if Brenda hadn’t started that ruckus in the papers about being a lesbian, things might have worked out real different for Bang Bang Bang. Although I reckon it was Anndora’s fault as much as Brenda’s that the group split up ’cause Anndora had a tantrum and stopped speaking to Brenda when the story about Brenda hit all the papers. ’cause they had a number one record and wasn’t nobody admitting back then that they was gay, it caused a big stir. Not like these days. Everybody in San Francisco is gay seems to me when they turn out in the thousands for them gay parades. I didn’t blame Brenda, when the fuss started, to take it upon herself to quit. Not that I hold with her laying up with women, ’cause as far as I’m concerned that’s uncalled for. But since she was the one doing all the singing and getting none of the glory, ’cause Joy and Anndora had all of it, she said she didn’t have to put up with Anndora giving her attitude.

Anndora being the youngest was used to having her way. Children born pretty as Anndora got people smiling up in their faces before they’ve earned it, so they start out thinking that life’s a pushover.

Which brought to mind that as much as I didn’t have time for Anndora, I would of rather been talking to her even than to Jesse.

‘How ’bout giving me Anndora’s number,’ I asked him.

‘Hang on, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I could put my hands on it. Tammy’s probably got it in her book somewhere, though I know Anndora’s like quicksilver the way she rushes from place to place. On planes and off planes more than Joy she was.’

I didn’t like to hear him mention Joy in the past tense. It was like he’d buried her already.

Last I’d heard, Anndora had been living in Milan, Italy, and it wouldn’t of surprised me to hear she’d shacked up with some gangster, ’cause all that ever interested her was brassy clothes and flashy cars and she didn’t care how she came by them. Joy said I didn’t give Anndora a chance, but then Joy was the main one who ruined her. When they was little, Joy used to dress Anndora up like a china doll and pull her up and down the streets in a red wagon so that folks would stop ’em to ooh and aaah. Joy wasn’t but four years older than Anndora, but once Tammy went off the rails over John Dagwood, Joy played mother. She had sense but she was too soft, so little as Anndora was, she walked all over Joy and that didn’t never change that I could see even after they got big. Kindness is one thing but you ain’t ’sposed to let people treat you like a door mat.