Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

Boo happened after an indiscretion and whatnot, Peanut had said.

An indiscretion? Lee asked.

Yeah. An indiscretion. I had Boo when I was twelve.

Twelve?

Yeah. Twelve. I wasn’t as smart then as I am now.

Wow. Twelve.

But he’s my baby, and I love him mo than anything in this world, even if his father is a stupid bastard and whatnot.

Lee hadn’t pursued it. He understood the maternal instinct. A bond greater than any indiscretion. Peanut was in love with him. Even if she wasn’t, she was the right woman for him.

They had met two weeks ago at the Look It Over Lounge. Lee’s daughter, Samantha, had run away from home, and he had decided to celebrate. The bar drew him like a magnet. He put on an Italian double-breasted suit. Three-hundred-dollar alligator shoes. Slipped on his two best diamond rings. Drove to the lounge. Lee rarely drank, and then, only a mild cocktail. Peanut fixed him a piña colada. The liquor’s warmth relaxed him. He detected a flicker of interest in Peanut’s face. Didn’t let the opportunity slip by. He stuck around. Made small talk. Quitting time, Peanut invited him to her hangout, the Southway Lounge. The heat of a second piña colada unfroze his tongue. He explained that he owned the Black Widow Exterminating Company. Had accounts with many of the best office buildings in this city and neighboring cities. Revealed that he owned six buildings, valued at a million dollars each.

How old are you? She squeezed one of his biceps. He had done his push-ups and pumped some iron at home. He needed to do something about his belly. Had seen an X-rated movie where a woman made her partner keep his shirt on while they had sex. She couldn’t stand the sight of his potbelly. Lee had decided to work out daily. Burn off the fat.

Old enough, baby girl. He decided not to reveal his age. Peanut smiled, leaving him to believe she enjoyed the mystery about his age. Lee had inherited his father’s height but not his good looks. Everyone always thought he was older than he was.

They stepped out onto the dance floor. Lee’s back was board stiff. His hips failed to twist. Peanut was as good as he was clumsy. Shook the devils in her hips. Lee decided to take dancing lessons.

They’d gone to the Southway Lounge every night since. Lee had applied himself, with an ever-increasing determination, to impressing Peanut. Flowers. Dinners. Cards. Exercise.

He’d also decided not to reveal anything about the only woman in his past. While giving birth to Samantha, his wife had died, on the second anniversary of his company. He hadn’t related his sixteen miserable years with Samantha. She was a fat, black, ugly, stanky, bald monster, mouth frozen in a permanent sneer — rubbery lips forever smeared with chicken grease or marzipan — a cold glitter in her eyes. She couldn’t move without dragging her food-heavy feet. God, why did I name her after my mother? he thought. He couldn’t think of another name, and his wife’s name, Loretta, was pain and loss. It was spite for him that got Samantha a cashier’s job at Hi-Lo Foods. Spite that made her give customers items for free. Fired after two weeks. You’d think a girl who did well in school would have better sense. Couldn’t do anything right, couldn’t cook or sew or wash dishes or mop a floor or wash a load of clothes without messing up. And always feeling sorry for herself. (Once he peeped through her bedroom keyhole and saw her doing a slow drag all by herself, her fat body a toy top wobbling out its last revolutions.) Yes, and the night she ran away from home, the night he found out that she was fucking the most notorious thug in the neighborhood, CC … Yes, CC, who liked to string up cats and set fire to them. Liked to snatch ladies’ purses and knock old folks upside the head.

That night Lee had a strange dream. He was a bird flying over a body of water. The sun hot and his wings heavy with sweat. He couldn’t see his own body, but the shadow of his outstretched wings moved over the water. The sky darkened. His moving shadow turned white. The water changed to blood. Lee got tangled in the new tree-thick darkness. Moved his sweaty wings. Managed to break free. He changed into a bird of fire that singed the sky and left it black.

When he awoke, his mouth was dry, his neck stiff — both stuffed with cotton. A glass of water beckoned him into the kitchen. CC rushed into his vision. CC, in Lee’s kitchen, all toothpick arms and potbelly. Sam butt naked beside him, holding his elbow. Beyond belief. How could the human body contain such fat? In one motion, CC grinned and zipped up his pants. Lee grabbed the nearest thing he could find, a jar of strawberry jelly. Hurled it at CC’s head. A red fire-quick blur spurted out the door, laughing all the while. The jar shattered against the door, leaving a red blob like in one of those fancy paintings in the ritzy office buildings.

Got to throw better than that, old motherfucker, CC said from outside the door.

Lee kept the words at arm’s distance. Spoke. Are you fucking that bastard?

Daddy, talk to me with some love. Samantha ran out — the fastest Lee had ever seen her move — after CC. Lee had not seen her since.

The night he met Peanut, he heard someone messing with the locks on the kitchen door. Samantha and CC. The following morning he had all the locks changed — though the locksmith had found no evidence of tampering — and bars put on all the windows.

That part of his past, Lee had to keep locked away. And there was more. He hadn’t told Peanut that his mother had killed his father and then herself.

That he had spent the first eighteen years of his life in Keepback, Mississippi, a small, isolated, all-black community. The nearest town more than twenty miles away. The civil rights movement a continual event sparkling in the glass-eyed television. Lynching and Klan atrocities echoed like folktales given a horrible twist. White people: gray blots on television. Cataracts. And when the old folks spoke of these blots, Lee wondered if whites were foreigners from another country or even beings from another world.

Lee, his mother, and his father lived in a small house before a field of pear trees. During slavery, Keepback had been a single plantation. Their house was the only structure that remained from those days. The old folks said it had been the main nigger’s quarters. Lee’s father had transformed it into a library with books on science, math, and business. During the day, Lee went to school. At night his father taught him to manage receipts and figure accounts. Then he studied books from the library until he retired to bed.

The townspeople were farmers. They grew squash, tomatoes, and sorghum, for molasses, and black-eyed peas, corn, collard greens, watermelons, and cantaloupes. Though the house where Lee lived was modest, it was a mansion in comparison with the farmers’ shacks. Keepback had poor irrigation; a good harvest was rare. They lived in wooden shacks with wooden floors. They pumped their water from wells. They shat in outhouses, a phone directory — thick Sears Roebuck catalog near at hand. Lee’s family enjoyed furniture, carpeting, and comfortable beds. A bathroom. Indoor plumbing that Pop had installed. Pop had converted the front part of the house into a grocery and liquor store. Pop owned one of the few automobiles in town, a blue pickup truck. Bought liquor from Canton, fifty miles away. Brought it back to his store and sold it at twice the price paid. Gave out free beer once a month. Kept a fishbowl of free gumdrops for kids. Kept all his money in a safe behind his counter.

Pop had fought in the Second World War. The only black soldier to receive seven Silver Stars. After the war, he made one fabled city in the north his new port of call. Fell from a commuter platform. Lost a leg to a train. Screwed in a wooden one in its place. Took a train back home. In Canton, purchased the ex-slave’s quarters— from a white real-estate agent — with his army savings. Lee recalled his father — the smooth pebble of his face carried forever in Lee’s pocket — nearly seven feet tall and weighing well over three hundred pounds, stomping about without a cane or crutches. One size-fifteen foot and one peg leg. Hands made for a man half his size. Dark skin as smooth as a baby’s behind. The leg and his teeth— each tooth like a rail tie across the length of Lee’s memory — were his only ugly features.