Noy Holland - The Spectacle of the Body

Me and him, we’re lovers. Sure, I know he’s a crazy motherfucker. And I’m the Banana Queen of Opelousas.

They say I’m the prettiest since Launa Lee. But you best clap your eyes on Jimmy — he is something, too. If you saw Jimmy down by the river in his pretty turquoise truck, you’d say, Jimmy Lucas, he’s plumb got everything , a dog in the back, banking turns, his Banana Queen right close. He’d lift a finger from the steering wheel, tip his head to mean something mean. It’s the way Jimmy is. I’ve seen it happen, I should know, I rode with him a lot.

Nights at the No Knees we ride to, Jimmy sets me up on the long bar. “Just look at you,” he says to me, his eyes wild and proud. “You boys come on, take a look at her. She is the Queen of Bananas.”

People know about me and Jimmy. Jimmy was the first, I swear it. When I try remembering, creosote comes back best — two coats tacky on the storehouse floor, black across my back and legs. Helps cure dry rot. Don’t I know? I slapped it on myself.

Oh, I’d have been down there anyhow, watching the boys ice the trains. I tell you, it’s too hot for work like that here in Opelousas. Those chunks were all of fifty pounds, nothing but hooks to hoist them with. Those boys, they were always bright with sweat.

I used to sit up in the big red oak, just sorting, my head lining up with their half-bare bodies: Jimmy, Jasper, Isaac, Read. Jimmy, Isaac, Jasper, Read. Jimmy was the first, I swear it. “Hey, Jimmy,” I sang out, real softlike, just enough for me and the birds. “Hey, Jimmy.”

He was a sight to see, standing splay-legged on a silver car, sweat running rivers down his back. A round, ugly fellow would come dawdling along, sticking bananas for safety’s sake. “Just don’t seem quite right,” he’d say, eyeing the mercury like somebody’s momma. “Best load her up, she’s hot.”

After a spell, the peel he stuck went black inside as a bullet hole.

Oh, bananas.

Opelousas is the banana capital of the universe — cars and cars, quick up from Mexico City. Good seasons, those boys worked all night, throwing ice down the loud chute. Jasper always did the last of it. He was the oldest and he’d been to prison. Mind you, I hardly looked at Jasper. I wasn’t as bad as all that. I seen his black arms bare, though, veins standing out like hard-ons in church.

Momma like to drive me loopdy-looped as she is about Jimmy. “My lover Jimmy,” I say in front of her. “My man Jimmy.”

She don’t stand for it. He’s a no-count. He ain’t the hitching kind. He spits tobacco juice on her kitchen floor, no two words about it. Oh, sweet Jesus, I know. Jimmy’s got a mean streak an acre wide that puts up a fence around me, puts a little shiver in me like I just better be ready, like expect the worst, because here it’s coming. But I like it.

I don’t know.

I do.

When I started in on Jimmy, Momma like to pinch my head off. I’d get my hair done up. “How could you!” You could hear her across the county. “How could you!”

Lord, my momma can carry on. Some nights she’s talking a blue streak upstairs, and I lie down, dying for the train — all those explosions right in a row, and the whistle like something to run from.

Maybe I’m a sinner to sleep naked like I do.

Some nights I dream of fire, running stark down Jefferson with the neighbors gawking. Some nights, Momma comes in, pushes her hands around on me. “Sweet sugar child, don’t go.”

Daddy left way back, took a liking to some Mississippi baby doll. Folks say it’s Momma I favor. But Momma wasn’t ever Banana Queen. She ain’t the contestant type. She like to laid down and get run over when Daddy brought his hussy — that’s what I call her, his hussy — home. I knew it already. One day, early from school, I spied them, out at the kitchen sink, her bent down like she was spitting up, red hair spilling every which way. Strike me dead if I lie. I saw him sticking himself in her. It’s the gospel truth.

I never told Momma. But she knew, she knew. Daddy’s hussy’s got a swing any fool wants for his porch. Momma don’t say nothing. She just smiles sweetlike, slow in the doorway waving. Just like the Banana Queen of Opelousas. Just like me.

Me, I aim to be remembered. That’s why the Banana Queen. You can’t believe how it’s transporting. It hooked me Jimmy. I’d have set up in that red oak till I grew roots, hadn’t been for this yellow crown. Luana Lee is milk soup. Did Jimmy Lucas bat an eye? But give me a crown on appointment night, and Jimmy climbs up, clamps his hands on my face. “Ain’t you something,” he says to me. “If you ain’t a precious thing.”

Momma says it’ll teach me vanity, being a queen and all. She says it’ll make me big for my britches. I say, “Momma? Tell me something I don’t know already.”

Momma’s crazy, I can’t help it.

Momma says when your life gets short, folks stop listening to you. “How many times do we get to do this?” she says.

She says, “Fetch me a glass of water.”

I can’t help it. I want to sleep with in the woods in a queenly bed and lacquer my broken toenails. I want to dig through Jimmy Lucas. One day last summer, Jimmy set a stuffed doll astride a rail of fence. He took her to pieces, shot by shot, head first and feathers rising. I could see the inside of his mouth. The inside of Jimmy Lucas’s mouth is a dark, vibrating place.

I know.

I don’t look in Momma’s mouth. She’s got pretty lips, but she smells like dying. I bathe her in the mornings these days. I try to help her along. I set Momma down in her pink tub and she wraps her arms around my neck and whispers, “You should have killed me when you had a chance.”

A couple years back, before I got to be queen, we were loading up hay on the flatbed. This is what she means — that the Devil took hold, that I meant her to flip off the back of the truck, bales tumbling. Momma looks like that now, like she looked that day — shiny-eyed and barely breathing, a fuse fixing to blow.

Sometimes Momma wants my mouth on her breast, like when I was her child. I lay myself down beside her, in the darkness underneath the spread. Sometimes I think it could do me in — our nakedness, that, in my mouth, I can feel her old heart pounding. I try to help her along.

Like to make Jimmy wild, hearing this. “Don’t you touch that old whore,” he says. “You got to have a life of your own.”

It is all of it new to me. Everybody wants something I can’t figure. Jimmy wants a baby and I say, Why? The sense of it quits me. We could get us a trailer on the outskirts of town, a place where a dog could run. I just say, “No, Jimmy, no, no, no. You know I can’t, Jimmy, no.”

He don’t stand for it. He grabs me by my ankles and drags me around, my head swimming on the linoleum. “Fuck you, bitch,” he says to me. “Fuck you, cunt.”

He drags me around. When he comes down on me, I think I must look like Momma, all sprawled out, my head thrown back like I am coming on.

Jimmy ain’t come around since Daddy came home, but he is all I can think of.

Daddy done run out of luck. We supposed he drowned in the dirty river when they found his old brown boots. But Daddy ain’t been drowning, only getting fat.

“Where you been, Daddy?” I say through the screen.

He looks like some old boy I never knew in school.