NEW VOICES

A Short Story

by Jim Moore

The Path She Took To Escape

A MAN IS LYING IN BED with somebody else's wife. She's as white as a snowbank and he has a bear's black pelt of hair over his body. They haven't known each other long. Every part of them is new. They have just made love or they are getting ready to make love or maybe both. If this were a movie we were watching, we'd be expecting someone to break into the room at any moment. We wait, but nobody comes. He draws circles around her navel with his finger, tighter and tighter circles. She turns on her side and curls her round bottom, somehow whiter than the rest of her, against him in a way that cannot be misunderstood.

The man is Lomas Faircloth, and the woman is my mother.

Daddy is a thousand miles away and doesn't give a damn what momma does in this room with the wallpaper coming off the walls, a room in which a stranger has recently died, or in any other room for that matter. Daddy's busy hitting homeruns in AAA leagues in Sacramento and Kansas City and Tulsa. He gives each homerun a girl's name. He writes them in a book. That's how I got my name....Temple Holloway.

I'm in the next room, listening to Lomas and momma talk and laugh. I can't understand the words. Some nights I hear what sounds like a wrestling match neither is trying to win. For the first weeks they run together like horses stampeded, and when they stop to catch their breath and look around, they find me standing there.

"Momma," I say, "I learned a bad word in school today."

"What was it?"

I look at Lomas.

"Sonofabitch."

She smiles and hugs me. "Don't worry, Temple," she says, "you'll learn a lot of bad words when you get older."

"Tell me, momma, Tell me now."

We had been on our way to Tampa to stay with Aunt Helen and make a new start, when the car broke down in Fargo, Georgia. We'd wandered off the highway. The people in Fargo were good to us. An insurance man named Jake Welch needed a secretary, so momma decided to work for him until we had enough money to repair the car and move on. We rented a tiny shotgun house Jake's father lived in before he died.

Momma told Jake Welch we'd left St. Louis because my daddy had run off to California. The truth was daddy'd been gone long enough to send me three birthday cards with five dollars inside. The last card said, "Dear Temple, Happy Birthday! Eight Years Old! I can't believe it! Love, Daddy." I couldn't believe it either, since I'd turned nine that year. Momma was alone. She had me but she was alone.

In St. Louis, on weekends, we'd drive by houses where crimes had been committed or where strangers had been knocked flat by accident. It might have been murder, rape, robbery, or an entire family wiped out in a highway crash. She'd fill me in on the details from the newspaper as we drove past the silent houses. She said the sadness meant more to her, once she could picture a place in her mind. We'd circle the block. And we weren't the only ones. We saw the same cars again and again. I told momma, these other people, these other faces behind the windshields, they didn't look right in the head.

Momma called Aunt Helen. She was thinking hard, pushing a knuckle against her cheek and chewing on the inside, while she talked on the phone. She' been Aunt Helen's favorite growing up.

The next day we packed and left.

Fargo sat at the edge of the Okeefenokee Swamp. It was flat country. Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. A ranger at the state park said Fargo was the jumping off point for those who wanted to go into the swamp. Nobody much came. There was a gas station, a church, a grocery, a hardware store, and a shop where quilts were sold. A thick growth of pine trees and palmettoes took over where the back yards ended and the night sky had stars enough to drive you crazy if you tried to see them all.

Momma met Lomas at a fish fry the Herbert Cypress Company put on in the fall. It was a big outdoor affair that included tobacco spitting, logrolling, and swinging the ax competitions. We sat in the bleachers and listened to a band play country music. The crowd clapped and hollered after a song. Momma put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, a mighty, ear-splitting sound that caused those nearby to duck their heads into their jackets. Standing apart, a stocky bearded man blinked and stared, driven out of something. When it got dark, Lomas asked momma to dance.

Lomas had a spark in one eye. At first I thought light was striking that eye, but light had nothing to do with it.

He worked in the sawmill. Trucks drove up a small rise and unloaded logs down a metal skid. The logs rode a carriage through a screaming saw, and men stacked the cut boards as they came off the rollers. Some days we brought Lomas lunch and he'd be sweaty and covered with sawdust and we had to say everything twice before he heard it.

His daddy had been in the lumber business. He'd lived in Copeland in the Everglades for months at a time, hauling cypress and the hearts of pine to Miami for fenceposts. In the summers the family stayed with him. It was the best life in the world, Lomas said. He and his brother, Joe, trapped a mink, but no matter what they did, they couldn't tame it. He talked about panthers he'd seen, cigar orchids growing wild, and Indians. He said when a Seminole brave spoke to his daddy, his squaw would turn away so as not to be part of the conversation. He said an Indian girl could undress and dress right in front of you and you'd never see her nakedness.

Momma listened to these stories. Young and pretty, with dark hair and eyes, she brushed the bottoms of her tiny, high-arching feet before sitting crosslegged on the bed. She had danced ballet when she was little and had been good enough to win a trip to Chicago. Men saw something delicate in her and tended to treat her as though she were made of glass. This extra tenderness, she couldn't wait to melt away.

One morning, stirring sugar into her coffee and looking out the window at frost on the ground, momma said, "Lomas, your heart sure beats strong. Shakes the bed at night." That was the beginning of the end, and Lomas knew it . He stopped the coffee cup near his mouth. He was thirty-three years old, married twice, and understood that women tired of him after a time.

When spring came, Lomas said to me, "Have you been to the swamp yet?"

"No," I said.

"If you want, we'll go there tomorrow."

It was momma behind his asking. Momma thought we should spend some time together.

He woke me early in the morning.

"Bring a jacket," he said.

As we drove along, dogs stood baying in their cages, wanting to go. There were plenty of dogs in Fargo. When you sat outside on the porch, day or night, a dog might come stare at you. Some of them you came to know. Men used boards to separate dogs fighting in the street. Men talked about dogs, and seemed proudest of the ones closest to being pure killers.

It was wide water. The boat skimmed over the water and through thick gray mist. After we'd gone a ways, Lomas opened a paper sack and we ate cinnamon toast and drifted against the bank which was white with swamp lilies. My face was wet.

"Lomas," I said, "did you ever know my real daddy?"

"No, I never did."

"He's a baseball player. Momma says he went to California looking for a curveball he could hit."

I kept a picture of daddy on my dresser. In a suit and tie, a suitcase at his feet, he stood by a train, laughing. I wanted to know what he was laughing at. I wanted to know how much of him was inside me. Beside the train, a sign read, "Oklahoma."

We started again. An alligator splashed in from the bank to become a pair of eyes in the water. The orange sun shone through the trees. Channels turned off here and there, all the same.

Lomas said, "A swamp moves, you know."

"I know." I looked at the blue water and felt sure it hadn't moved in a million years.

"Where does it go?"

"To the ocean."

We landed on Billy's Island. Lomas said Billy Bowlegs, the Seminole Indian chief, had lived here. He picked a handful of lilies, and we walked a path through the woods to a clearing where a small graveyard spread in the sun. He squatted down next to a stone marker that said, Maggie Lee Faircloth.

"This is my mother's grave," he said. "Her name was Maggie, but everybody called her Shug."

"Why's that?"

"She had a sweet way about her, I guess."

"What made her die?"

"She had a stroke."

"A stroke," I said. "What's that?"

I looked at the other gravestones. They all looked older than hers.

"Is she the youngest one here?" I said.

He said, "She couldn't talk in the end."

"Why not?"

It was the first time we'd really been alone, and I had a lot of questions.

"What did she look like? Was she tall?"

Lomas left the lilies by the gravestone, and we sat under a tree nearby and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Soon the air warmed enough for orange butterflies to drop from bushes and flutter above the ground. I lay on pine-needles and looked at clouds crossing the sky. Some clouds I made into animals, but it wasn't a good day for that.

After awhile I said, "Lomas, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I don't know," he said. "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing."

"Yeah." He laughed. He had a real quiet way of laughing. His head rocked forward. I knew then he wasn't sorry to have brought me along.

When we got home, a neighbor's dog, Jip, was lying in the driveway. She took her time getting out of the way.

Momma was sitting with Jerrett on the back porch. They were drinking beer and shooting grasshoppers with a 22-rifle. Jerrett was 86 years old and lived next door. He was really piling the grasshoppers up.

"You promise me," momma said to Lomas, "we run over that dog, neither of us lifts a finger to save it."

Momma got mean when she drank, but before that she'd get kindhearted. It was obvious we'd missed the kindhearted part.

Wind shook the trees and a pear landed on the tin shed where Jerrett raised Pharoah quail. It'd surprised me to hear the old man say Pharoah, a word I'd learned in school. Jerret had taught me to suck the back of my hand to wake up an animal's curiosity.

"You want to come in the house?" Lomas asked Jerrett.

"Yeah, I guess so."

In June, when school let out, we left for Tampa. Lomas helped us load boxes into the car. He hugged momma, and he hugged me. He smelled like wood.

Aunt Helen said she was happy we 'd finally made it, and we said we were happy to be there. She lived in a house on Idlewild Street, up the hill from a duck pond. She played the organ in church, kept plastic on the furniture, her windows shut tight, and was dead set against fresh air blowing through the house. She took it upon herself to make a lady of me, but like the mink Lomas had tried to tame, I turned around in my own skin to bite her.

On Sunday afternoons at 5:30 we said the rosary with Bishop Sheen on the radio. Afterwards we'd watch Bonanza on Aunt Helen's old television which made everybody's skin green.

Momma began going out, saying she had errands to run. She didn't need to tell me where she was going. I knew she was back to driving by houses where tragedy had struck. One Sunday she met a fireman named Ernie Simms who, as luck would have it, fell asleep with the stove on and accidentally burned down his own house. Momma drove past , saw him walking through his burned-out house . She stopped the car. The only things left standing were the brick piers which had held up the floors, and a fireplace.

Ernie was handsome and thin with a brown mustache.

A few months later, they would marry. We would move north of town into a new house Ernie bought with the fire insurance money. As a going away present, Aunt Helen would give me a glow-in-the-dark rosary with beads the same pale green as Little Joe Cartwright's hands on her television. But before that. Before it became clear that Ernie and momma were the same in never expecting things to last, before Ernie began stockpiling razorblades for no reason, before momma earned and later bungled a reputation as a psychic, Ernie said to me, "You ever been in an airplane before, Temple?"

"No."

"Did you know I was a pilot? Do you want me to take you for an airplane ride?"

I guess I'd grown up by then. For it seemed odd, a man who'd just burnt down his own house, thinking I might want to fly in an airplane with him.

[ Story copyright © 1998 Jim Moore. All rights reserved. ]

Jim Moore was born in Tampa, one of seven children. He now works in the real estate business and is writing a novel called Worthy's Bail Bonds.


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