State of Grace Read online

  “I’ll stop and get some,” he said. He pulled into a gas station and bought a box of Kleenex. He pulled out several for her and then put the box in a glove compartment. “You’re my last fare of the day, isn’t that coincidental,” he said. “I mean it’s been a long day but it’s still early. Too early to start in reading all them books.” Beneath the Juicy Fruit there was a smell of spicy tomatoes. “You don’t look like a bookworm to me.”

  Kate wiped off her sunglasses. She put them back on.

  “How about joining me for a drink?” he said.

  “Why not,” Kate said. Her reply did not surprise her although it was not at all what she would have imagined herself saying.

  “I know a nice little place. It’s a bar on the water and they give you free lasagne roll-ups with your drinks until six.” He took a series of hard rights and turned onto the highway. The books slid across the seat. In less than a mile he turned off and down a partially paved road that led to a point on the bay. The land was bulldozed flat. Models for condominiums were scattered around and little flags and pennants were strung between concrete electricity poles. Then the land became wild and overgrown again and then there was the bay.

  The bar was a shingled house on pilings. Nailed on the walls were sharks’ tail fins.

  “Two of those mothers is mine,” the cab driver said. There was no one in the place but them and the bartender. The bartender was sneezing. “Two Mai-Tais,” the driver ordered. Kate turned on her stool and looked out the window. BRYANT’S BEASTS, a sign said over a crooked building on the other side of the road. BRYANT’S BOATS BRYANT’S BUNGALOWS. “Here’s to you,” the driver said. She took a swallow of her drink. It was all rum with a plastic orchid and a canned pineapple chunk in it. Her throat constricted and her eyes began to water. The driver coughed. “Them sharks will go for your hoses every time,” he said. “That’s no kind of a job.” He coughed. “What’s going on?” he asked the bartender.

  “Algae,” the bartender said morosely. “Two days now. It’s not red tide but it’s some lousy algae rotting out there.”

  “Goddamn,” the driver said. He got up. “You wait here,” he told Kate. He went outside and walked over to the bungalows. Kate thought of Uncle Wiggly. He was always so snug and clean. She swallowed her drink until it was gone. She saw something change hands between the driver and another man. He came back to the bar, coughing. “Two more Mai-Tais,” he said.

  The bartender turned away. “Why don’t we drink these over in that little cottage over there,” the driver said to Kate, smiling firmly. “We can’t hardly breathe here. They got fans in those cottages.” The bartender set down two fresh drinks. “Where are those free noodles today?” the driver asked him querulously, looking up and down the counter.

  “Nobody’s been here all day. I didn’t make them today. It wouldn’t have been economic.”

  “Goddamn,” the driver said.

  “I don’t kiss,” Kate said.

  “I couldn’t care less,” the driver muttered. She followed him to the first little cabin.

  “Look at that,” he said before they went inside. “Ain’t that cute. Little window boxes and a weather vane.” Inside, the room was cool. Her throat and eyes stopped troubling her.

  “Bryant’s the biggest flit I’ve ever seen,” the driver said.

  When they came out later it was almost dark. The wind had changed and the air was clear. The bar was lighted and Kate could see people moving around inside.

  “I gotta get back,” the driver said tensely. “I got obligations.”

  “I think I’ll stay,” Kate said. “I think I’ll have another drink.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” the driver said. She went back into the bar and played the juke box. The patrons were mostly parents and their children drinking ginger ale.

  “That was the song!” a child shouted. “That woman played just exactly the song I was going to play. Now I won’t have to play it.”

  Kate went into the ladies’ room. GULLS it said. She washed her hands and went back through the bar and outside. Between the bungalows and BRYANT’S BEASTS were stacked the boxes of her books. Her sunglasses were steamed up again and she still didn’t have a Kleenex. She took them off. She could hardly see any better even then, it being night. She went over to the crooked building that held the animals. There was a bleak smell of droppings. She tried to look in the dark windows.

  “What are you doing around here?” a voice hissed. “You been sent out here by somebody to drop a match?”

  “Oh no,” Kate said sadly.

  “They probably said ‘You just go on out there and move around and smoke a little,’ ” Corinthian Brown’s voice said.

  “I came over to see the animals,” she said. “I just wanted to look at them.”

  “Jest?” the voice rose. “Jest! That’s something which ain’t easy at all!” But the door opened up and she went in.

  CORINTHIAN BROWN’S DADDY shot down robins in the winter and baked them in delicious flaky pies. His daddy always would say that he could never understand how a bird so full of shit as the robin, dumping all his mean bug and berry shit over the clean clothes on the clothesline, could taste so good cut up in little pieces with a few peas and a little flour and water. His daddy shot up robins so neat you would have thought they weren’t dead at all.

  One morning as Little Corinthian was turning out of the yard to get to school, a police cruiser came screaming up the street and turned into their yard, shaking up the mud and almost knocking down the porch. The Audubon Society had complained, the Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters and the Surfside Bank who always had their ear to the ground for the rumble of possible trends. The tourists were horrified, the paper indignant and Brown became an object of rage and the chosen warning to the Negro community that the sick practice would no longer be tolerated. In Night Court four months later, he was sentenced to two years in the County Jail. The only voice raised in his behalf was that of an ugly smart-assed little dribble of a man who was later found to be not wanting to pay his federal income tax and who said that the shooting of songbirds in the neighborhood would not be necessary were there better housing and more jobs. Everyone agreed that if they heard that song one more time they’d throw up.

  Corinthian’s daddy didn’t say anything, not even to his boys. After one year in the jailhouse, he showed enough potential and good intentions to be considered for the position of dog-boy on the work crews sent out daily. He was a good dog-boy because he was strong and had an easy way with them and because he had good lungs and legs and could run with them through the sloughs and across the fields and weeds when the sheriff’s people were after fugitives. Brown no longer had anything to do with the police who were a loutish bunch of questionable authority. For running with the dogs he got a lot of fresh air and 1,500 extra calories worth of food a day. Two days before he was to be released, he wound the leashes of his dogs around a light pole and stepped down the road for a can of beer. He was rearrested and sentenced to an additional six months. After that was up it was springtime and he took a bus up to New Jersey where, after writing a note to his boy Corinthian on the back of a postcard which depicted the colorful Howard Johnson’s on Exit Seven of the Turnpike, he disappeared forever.

  The writing on the postcard said:

  “I’m sorry about doing this but I am worn out and got nothing to give you anyways. I hope that by now you have stopped pulling on yourself and have found yourself a woman and cleared up your face. I had a Fisherman’s Platter here and I hope you and Amos will be able to get one of those some day.”

  Corinthian could see that most of the message was for him but the part about the woman must refer to his brother as Corinthian was only seven years old.

  CORINTHIAN BROWN’S BROTHER shot up mayonnaise and peanut butter as well as anything else he could pop. He had blue eyes which are always very bad luck for a black man. Corinthian loved his brother and worried about him incessantly. When Amos w
asn’t messing himself up in the shed, he would be very sweet to Corinthian and make as much of a meal that was possible for him when he came home from school. Most usually, it was a lard and sugar sandwich and a pitcher of Kool-Aid. In the months of May and June it was a strawberry and sugar sandwich. Amos always asked Corinthian what he learned from his books and would always find his replies hilarious.

  One evening just before suppertime, Corinthian heard a scuffling in the shed and opened it to find Amos writhing on the floor, his blood, for the most part, filled with liquid Sterno. It seemed the police were always driving through the neighborhood and this evening just before suppertime was no exception. They saw the little boy howling and crying and taking dizzy steps into and out of the shed. By the time they carried Amos into the back of the squad car he was already dead.

  “Lookit that,” one policeman said to the other, “it’s pissing all over the seat,” and they made Corinthian clean everything up before they moved on.

  Amos was buried in a place that was difficult to get to. Corinthian couldn’t remember if they had told him where. Corinthian had a series of jobs for the next few years which didn’t work out. He had an unpleasant skin condition which people were fearful they’d contract. They thought it was catchy, like ping-pong flu. All the doctors Corinthian had seen had told him that the disorder was psychosomatic and caused neither by heredity or dermatophytes. How could it be catching? It had caught him and that seemed to be the end of it.

  “Are you often afraid?” Corinthian asked Kate that night.

  The ostrich was following the darkness falling off her silver earrings as she moved her head.

  “They like shiny things,” Corinthian said, interrupting himself. “They like to play with spoons.”

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  “Are you afraid all the time?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I’m afraid all the time,” Corinthian told her bravely.

  TERRY BARFIELD’S PRETTY PIEBALD was the reason he was in the sheriff’s posse. That horse represented the life he loved and couldn’t get enough of—the gear and the parades and the good camaraderie and the dragging for criminals or fishermen who drowned off the keys or in the swamp. He knew it was all ornamentative and an anachronism but it was easily the most significant part of his life. He had four daughters who gave him nothing but back talk and one frail son who spent every moment messing with numbers, adding, multiplying, subtracting, dividing like a fancy computer. “There’s never enough paper around here,” the boy would scream and beat his head on the table until it bled. Terry Barfield had nothing but trial and misery and his beautiful piebald horse. He was a cracker and his poppa had been a cracker but a real one, an expert with his whip, and foot-loose and fancy in his leisure after driving cattle all day, and Terry Barfield wished that he had been him, born him or even born before him. That was the time to have been a man. He would have shown them what for then. He would have been cock of the rock.

  Now he was just trying desperately to hold onto his horse which his wife wanted to sell so she could get a gas barbecue. He was working too much and suffering too much, he said. He had a bellyache all the time. Sometimes it hurt him to piss. His wife told him that was from the horse. He’d liked to have strangled her.

  He worked all day driving the cab and then he drove his truck for the county all spring and summer through the mosquito and tourist season. He drove it in the three hours before dawn. He drove it now. It was five o’clock in the morning. He was in the college compound, smoking a black cigar and pulling on the lever he’d installed that released the malathion. His headlights picked up a raccoon hustling across the winding road in front of him. He tromped on the accelerator but the engine just grunted. “Oh Christ,” he said, grinding his teeth. He shot out a cloud of chemicals and spit out the cigar.

  The truck moved along. It had been made from a car, the back lopped off, pine planking wedged on the chassis where the cylinders were mounted. A green and benignant truck, one headlight kicked in, something winglike fluttering against the exposed radiator grid. “Oh Christ, Christ,” Barfield roared. He turned the wheel so hard that for one awesome moment he thought he’d broken it off, and moved the wheels up over the sidewalk curb for a hundred yards or so, bouncing and weaving toward the nigger boy who ambled along there like a fool, his hands fanned out as though he were holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres. Barfield had worked this route for weeks, licensed by the county, being paid by the county and using their gasoline and equipment but wearing out his own truck and wearing down his balls and his own, what he considered to be, innate good nature for nothing more than he could see than another piece of crap his wife would buy and set up in the house. He owed 673 dollars to the finance company and his old lady was having the change. He was so sick of it all he’d liked to have spit and the final indignity had become the first for each morning before the sun came up as he was doing his honest work he would come across this loitering nigger doing his party time right before his eyes.

  He was afraid of making too much of a racket. He didn’t want any complaints. But every day he wanted to make a mulched stump of Corinthian Brown.

  AL GLICK’S SIGN on the edge of his junk-yard says

  Anyone caught beyond this point without my permission had better have settled for his soul to go to God because his ass belongs to me

  The sign troubles Corinthian Brown even though it is his job to be daily beyond the point that Glick refers to. Al Glick killed his first and last wife by pushing her face too hard into a hot pan of her cooking that he didn’t care for. He broke a waitress’ hand in an argument over the price of a slice of pizza and he put a boy’s eye out in a fight about pinball bowling. So each early morning that Corinthian enters the cars’ graveyard, which is still as any graveyard, he can feel himself getting shot. He can feel it and he can see his head popping off and rolling into the morning wet weeds where they’d shovel it up like a rabid squirrel’s, put it in a box and send it up to the laboratory in Tallahassee. Each morning he moves past the sign, coming or going away again, he knows it’s his last moment. They are going to dismember him. He’s going to hear a snap behind him and they’re going to be on him like white on rice, turning him every which way but loose.

  But nothing of the sort happens. Corinthian stands intact within Glick’s boundaries. The dogs trot up and sniff him thoroughly for he has the smell on him of all of Bryant’s Beasts. Corinthian works continually. He is a wakeful watchful boy. He seldom sleeps. He has probably slept only one hundred hours in his whole life. He moves through the dogs which wind themselves around his legs. Each morning, the dogs suffer the same indignation, hysteria and delight as they glut themselves on the scents of the Beasts. Corinthian reeks of feed and droppings, fish and mice, hair, hide, scaled backs and feathers. Corinthian is truly a phenomenon, a representation of the natural world trapped, an example of the basic made bizarre by cages. But those who speak are not aware of his existence.

  Now it is not that Corinthian is himself caged. It is not that he does not move out into the world. He has places where he goes. He has his routes. He uses the movie theatre, the County Book-Mobile, Super-M Drugs, where he buys lotions for his skin’s disease, and a café where he eats supper and breakfast in the morning. He leaves Bryant’s Beasts while it is still dark, for Bryant begins each day early and eagerly. Bryant believes that each day is the one that will turn the tide, that will make him a man of means. He is a big bouncing man with fine pale hair and big teeth. He has many frustrations but he remains hopeful. He loves jujubes. He chews on them all day long. One thing that annoys Bryant is that he can buy jujubes only in very tiny boxes that seem to be only one-sixth full. He would like to have hundreds of them available at all times but the fulfillment of this small desire does not seem to be in the near future. Another thing he wants is to be allowed to become a member of the Chamber of Commerce. This is remote. The thought of Bryant becoming one of their own makes the members drink too much and spe
ak unseemly. Bryant’s Beasts is just within the city’s limits, a maverick on the Gulf’s backwash, a tin and broken blemish which drives the mayor and commissioners mad. “Jest let that pissant make one mistake and I’ll close him up,” the mayor says several times a week. But Bryant is a modest citizen, obeying the laws. All of his toilets function. His animals make no noise. No one has ever gotten sick on his snacks. The only thing that the commissioners and the Chamber of Commerce can do is hope that the place will burn down. Then they can forbid him to build it up again because of the zoning.

  In the meanwhile, Bryant comes to his establishment early, rakes up the beach and sets up for his patrons. He sells mementos, nut logs and jellies. He rents beach umbrellas, rubber rafts, and three bungalows, day, week or season. Bryant would naturally like his Beasts to become a tourist must but visitors are uninterested in anything which is not indigenous. After all, they might as well have stayed at home if they’re not to see something indigenous. The Beasts are the weak link in Bryant’s business. His driving range is patronized as is his chili-dog and soft ice-cream stand. His paddle boats are popular. It is the Beasts that no one wants to pay to see even though the price is only seventy-five cents. He has a black bear, a llama, a leopard, a buffalo, a coyote, three deer and two egg-eating snakes. He has two dusky sharks, a bull shark, a tank of turtles and cow-nose skates and two walking catfish, which should alone guarantee half a hundred visitors a day. He has parrots, an ostrich, a kestrel and a vulture. Almost no one comes to see them. Days go by without anyone having observed the Beasts, but nightly, Corinthian, their caretaker, watches them and leaves with his watching pure and unbothered. For no one watches Corinthian. Or would give a penny for what he saw.