A Savage Wisdom Read online

  “Pick them up and put them in the trunk,” Toni Jo said to Arkie. She kept an eye on the naked man while Burk did her bidding and returned with a rope. “Tie him up,” she ordered.

  His back to Toni Jo, Nevers spoke for the first time of his own accord.

  “I’m not the same man you knew, Annie. I’m a new man.”

  She went into a frenzy.

  “Liar! You’re exactly the same. And my name is Toni Jo, you bastard. Annie was your whore.”

  The man turned.

  In the fog-clouded lights, his heavy genitals looked out of proportion to the rest of his emaciated body. Burk was enraged at this man who had been with his wife. He felt diminished in her eyes. Humiliated.

  Seeing the naked man who had let others watch while he used his equipment on her, Toni Jo lost her senses.

  “You maggot, slime, shit, goddamn bastard shit sonofabitch slime horsedick! You horsedick whore-maker!” She turned on her husband. “Kill him! Kill him now!”

  Burk raised the gun and pointed it at Harold Nevers’s chest. He pulled the hammer back and held his breath.

  “Don’t do this, Arkie,” Nevers said. “I’m not worth it.”

  Toni Jo moved towards her husband.

  “He’s a con man, Arkie. Don’t let him fool you. Shoot him.” Burk continued to aim at Nevers. Toni Jo lost her patience. “Kill him. If you love me, kill him. Do it.”

  Do it—the phrase reminded her of what Nevers had tried to make her say. It triggered a savage vengeance in her.

  “Do it!” she screamed. “Do it!” She reached for the pistol. It fired.

  Shocked, afraid he had hit Nevers, Burk loosened his hold on the pistol. Toni Jo wrenched it from his hand. She aimed the heavy piece at the man’s bare chest.

  “This is the only thing you ever deserved,” she said.

  “Annie,” Nevers said.

  “Toni Jo! Goddamn you, my name is Toni Jo Henry.”

  “Toni Jo, don’t do this. You’re a better person than this. Don’t let me do this to you.”

  Toni Jo wanted Nevers to fear her, but he was calm. For a moment, she thought his conversion might be real. It was an irony she could not tolerate, that he was forgiven and free.

  “Down!” she yelled. “Get down on your knees.”

  “Toni,” Burk said.

  She turned the pistol on her husband. “Stay back, or I swear to God I’ll shoot you, too.”

  “Toni,” he repeated.

  “Toni Jo! Can’t anybody get that right? My name is Toni! Jo! Henry!”

  Burk moved back a step. His wife was obviously deranged.

  Toni Jo swung the pistol back to Nevers and trained it on his chest.

  “Get down in the mud,” she commanded.

  Nevers knelt down.

  Toni Jo stared at him. “Harold Nevers,” she began.

  Toni Jo forced herself to walk slowly towards him, as if she were sneaking up on an especially large cockroach for a disgusting but necessary extermination.

  The man, naked, kneeled before her in the misty yellow light.

  When she reached him, she pressed the snub-nosed .38 against his forehead and pulled the trigger, spattering his last thoughts, grey and warm, onto her face and dress.

  The man fell back in the mud with a wet slap.

  Burk screamed, “Jesus God, Toni Jo!”

  Chapter Two

  April 1938

  He appeared suddenly, as if from nowhere, like angels and cockroaches tend to do.

  . . .

  It was a clean, still April afternoon at the Time-Out Cafe. Arriving at the paper mill in early morning darkness, the workers labored for six relentless hours at their posts: the barking drums, chippers, digesters, and Fourdrinier machine. It was sweaty, dirty, dangerous work, and the men proudly wore the scars to prove it—nasty-looking burns at various stages of healing on their arms and faces from working with caustic soda, bleaching, and acid solutions; twisted, knotted, or missing fingers damaged by or donated to the winders and slitters; waxy palms with large splinters enshrined in calluses from feeding the conveyor belts for thirty years.

  At noon, a turbulent mass of tattooed, pot-bellied men invaded the diner, ringing the copper bell on the front door like a herd of stampeding cows. Laughing and mock-boxing, feinting and punching, they shouted friendly curses when someone hit too hard. The same men occupied the same tables every day. Big Jake, the short-order cook, knew how many Blue Plate specials to prepare, how many cornbeef sandwiches and hash browns, how many burgers and fries. Toni Jo’s job was to pour from the triple urn and then deliver fifty cups of black coffee while taking orders, personal compliments, and life’s complaints from boys and men she had known for most of her twenty years.

  “T.J.! What’s cooking?” said R.O., a red-cheeked man of fifty who looked seventy, a lifetime of soot compressed in the large pores of his bulbous nose. While he spoke, Toni Jo studied the tuft of red and grey hair bursting from the open collar of his blue-plaid shirt like a small but menacing animal. “What do I want, beautiful girl?”

  “Grilled ham and cheese, don’t toast the bread, heavy on the mayo. Pickles and chips on the side. Bottle o’ Coca-Cola, punch a hole in the top with an ice pick.”

  “Not only is she pretty,” R.O. said, tilting his sweat-stained fedora back and looking around the table, “but she’s smart, too.”

  Rolling a smoke, the cinched bag of Avalon in his teeth, T-Bob, who would have graduated with Toni Jo from DeRidder High in 1936 if he hadn’t gotten Tammy Sue pregnant, quipped, “O’ course she can recite yer order. You been ordering the same thang for three years. A slopeheaded mo-ron could recite the Pledge Allegiance if you said it to him a thousand times.”

  This was C.T.’s cue to take off his tired khaki cap and “whup T-Bob upside the head” until he apologized for talking like that “in front a lady.” This time, the metal button thwacked T-Bob good, so he hit C.T.’s forearm, hard, with a pointed knuckle. C.T. held his arm out so everyone could admire the muscular contortion. Beneath the taut skin, an egg-sized knot rose and subsided like a monstrous parasite rolling over after a long nap.

  Toni Jo didn’t mind the good-natured roughness of the men, whose kidding signaled that they knew she was way out of their league. These were men whose girlfriends had missing teeth or gold teeth, whose wives had false teeth or none at all, men with no opinions to express, whose beliefs had been the same, back three generations to the Civil War.

  Halfway into their shift, these men spent an hour in the Time-Out Cafe for food and recreation. Then, like a furious wave fizzling into harmless bubbles on a sandy shore, the noon rush from the paper mill receded, leaving only the vinegary odor of evaporated sweat lingering in the air to remind Toni Jo of their presence.

  After their departure, from each tabletop Toni Jo shot the collective nickel or dime tip into an apron pocket. Two terms of F.D.R.’s good words, good will, and Works Projects had done much for the morale but little for the pocketbooks of America. Just last year, the stock market had fallen faster than it had on Black Tuesday in ’29 and now the country was languishing in the Roosevelt recession. The President’s fireside chats warmed hearts, though few stomachs were nourished by his alphabet soup: the WPA, PWA, NRA, FCA, NIRA, FDIC, ICC, CCC. . . .

  Toni Jo had bussed the silver and stoneware into the kitchen and was wiping down the last table, back in the corner by the jukebox, thinking, “In four months, I’ll have enough money to attend the Normal School in Natchitoches. Then I can teach anywhere in Louisiana I want. Then. . . . She had never reached that far in her daydreaming. “Then what?” She had spent most of her mental energy just getting to Natchitoches. “Get married, I suppose. Have four or five kids. . . . And then what?”

  The kitchen humidity drew beads from Toni Jo’s forehead and upper lip. “Tomorrow, I’ll turn on the fans,” she was thinking when she heard the sneeze. A waitress who prided herself on missing nothing in the Time-Out Cafe, Toni Jo twitched and glanced up to see the m
an who seemed to have appeared from nowhere. He wore a dusty-blue seersucker suit and painted four-in-hand tie. On the gray fedora parked in front of him, he was tapping a rhythm out of time with the tune coming from the jukebox, Glenn Miller’s “At Your Beck and Call”—a song he had perhaps composed or was just composing and which only he could hear.

  “Bless you,” she called spontaneously from across the room with a smile.

  Toni Jo walked briskly towards him, apologizing while reaching into her apron pocket for the ticket book, then apologizing again for not having it and starting towards the counter. The man laughed congenially, showing a row of perfectly formed teeth.

  “I’m sure you can remember my order between here and there. What’s that, fifteen feet?”

  “Right,” Toni Jo said, nervously pushing an unruly curl back into the tiara-like cardboard cap. “What’ll you have?”

  The man looked at her with an unhurried smile. Feeling self-conscious under his gaze, Toni Jo spoke to fill the vacancy.

  “Um, a menu. You need a menu.” She pivoted on both feet without moving from her spot.

  She was nervous, not because the man was handsome—though he was plenty that, she thought—but because he was unfamiliar. When she realized she was acting jumpy, she became more anxious and tried to regain her composure by focusing between his eyes, her body still twisted halfway towards the order window, her face directed at the intriguing scar, an elongated, four-cornered star, like a miniature kite someone had sailed up the bridge of his nose.

  “A steak. You must have a steak back there somewhere.”

  “Chicken-fried,” Toni Jo said. The man burst out laughing, and Toni Jo blushed at the small-town crassness of the entrée.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “And mashed potatoes and gravy—that’s what folks up here eat, isn’t it? And two or three vegetables. Whatever you can pick from the kitchen patch out back.”

  Again he laughed, but this time with a timbre that put Toni Jo at ease, as if this small town were a bad joke they had both made up.

  “And tea,” he called out as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  While waiting for the water to boil, Toni Jo passed by the order window to peek at the Time-Out Cafe’s newest patron. His left arm over the chairback, he was twisted toward the order window, twirling his hat on the index finger of his left hand while whistling “Rock of Ages.” Waiting for her to do exactly what she had done, he chortled softly at his private prediction come true.

  Toni Jo delivered the order. Careful not to appear too solicitous, she simply asked, “Anything else?” The man held up his hand, palm facing her, to indicate everything was fine. She pivoted and walked towards the kitchen.

  “Hey!” he said. Toni Jo spun around. “How about some—how do y’all say it?—catch-up?”

  Toni Jo laughed.

  “What the heck, right? When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

  In the back, after tallying the lunch receipts, Toni Jo checked through the order window to discover that the man had vanished. Her heart felt like Big Jake had laid it on the chopping block and hit it emphatically, once, with a meat-tenderizing mallet.

  Retrieving the stranger’s plate, she found half a dozen small coins—the price of the meal and the tip, a brilliantly shiny silver dollar. Toni Jo wiped her hands on her apron and carefully lifted the heavy medallion from the table. She turned it slowly in both hands, inspecting it—the spiked crown and flowing hair, the slender neck and aquiline profile of Liberty, her lips sensuously parted—finally noticing the date, 1935, the last year the Peace Dollar was struck, the year saved by everyone lucky enough to spare a buck for the sake of sentimentality. Toni Jo wrapped the coin in a Kleenex and slipped it in the side pocket of her purse.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, the afternoon crowd began to slink and hobble in. Lenny first, then Joe Bob, then C.R., Sam-T, Little Mack. They weren’t knotty-muscled hoodlums or dropouts, nor were they tobacco-spitting old-timers, that leisure class of worn-out citizens who alternated between the courthouse steps and Woody’s Barbershop from ten to four ever since there had been a town square. They were heroes, one-armed or one-legged veterans from the Great War: not even old—forty, forty-five—their still-good bodies awkward with the curious subtractions—the arm that threw a baseball, the foot that kicked the can—now buried in France or blown to bits across the countryside, long since obscene compost for the first crop of post-war grapes or peacetime olives.

  Unlike their boisterous, able-bodied counterparts, they talked quietly with Toni Jo, asked how her mother was doing, what she thought of Benny Goodman’s new swing sound, or whether Howard Hughes was a kook, thinking he could fly around the world, pausing now and then to make sure the slack sleeve was still neatly tucked in a trouser pocket.

  For her part, she attended to them, did not patronize, felt no need to overdo it. They knew she respected what they had done. Her father had died with them, his body even now lying with their fragments there in Europe while the believers among them waited over here for some kind of apocalyptic reunion with their missing parts and the rest hoped for an adequate conclusion to their broken lives.

  As Toni Jo served them, she thought of the man with the kite-scar and painted tie, his eyes as green as coke bottle glass. Until he walked in, she hadn’t realized she had been waiting for him—though she had begun to notice a vague, nagging discontent she tossed off as mere irritation at the slow grind of her necessary job.

  Her life had been small—much too small for where she thought she’d be by this time in her life, for Toni Jo Henry was beautiful and she had proof. Most Attractive, Class of 1936. Most Popular, 1936. Class Belle, 1935. Miss Congeniality, 1934. And so on, as far back as she could remember. Little Miss DeRidder, 1924. Set in a face of unblemished baby skin, her eyes, as shiny-dark as varnished buckeye seeds, peered out of school yearbooks in innocent surprise.

  Natural kindness she had, too, even before she realized the effect on men of her skin, eyes, and burnished-brown, not-quite-auburn hair. It was this quality that enabled her to deflect the quick hands of John Paul, star running back of the DeRidder Bulldogs in 1935 when they went to state, and just last week to gently rebuff a butt-pat from the mayor and not even make him feel ashamed—and he a married deacon at her own church.

  Toni Jo was attractive and good and was beginning to chafe under the smallness of her life. Then, there he was, her first chance to make a quick, tidy escape, and she had been too guileless to flirt, to drop a suggestive word or leading hint that might result in a simple date and later marriage. Such things were not unheard of. She would have cursed her luck or stupidity if she had been given to cursing.

  Frustration from long work hours, the tedium of waiting for better times, the plain energy-drain of constantly thinking of others first had been building in Toni Jo for the past few weeks. The veterans, even, were starting to grate on her nerves. When they had said their too-pleasant goodbyes and she had wiped the tables clean for the third time that day and was sitting by the jukebox looking at the fashion drawings in Wednesday’s paper, a large housefly landed on the rounded corner of the table.

  Toni Jo Henry was a sweet girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly—except that as a waitress she was duty-bound to eliminate the pests. Thoughtfully, without taking her eyes off the insect, she doubled, then redoubled the newspaper, and in a swift, vindictive movement of displaced and long-suppressed anger, squashed the fly into a wingèd blot of red-black goo and erased him from the table with a single swipe of an ammoniaed rag.

  * * *

  At six o’clock it was C.T., R.O., T-Bob, and that crew again, only much dirtier and more rank this time. The same jokes. The same compliments and complaints. The same responses on Toni Jo’s part.

  Toni Jo served the men hurriedly, anxious to escape the cafe and get out the door in the early evening. She wanted to enjoy the cool walk home, smell the azaleas and give her thoughts over to the future, perhaps a change of plans, and what she c
ould say to engage the new man should he reappear. Freshening C.T.’s coffee, she glanced out the window at a dark cloud and mentally crossed her fingers against the rain.

  At day’s end, while scraping down the griddle with a spatula, Big Jake furtively monitored Toni Jo, who threw utensils about, slammed drawers, and stacked papers with noisy haste. When she dropped a heavy glass mug that broke with the sound of a rifle shot, Jake stopped her.

  “Hey, slow down. You clock out early, you just th’owing good money away.”

  Emitting a weary sigh in answer, Toni Jo stooped and began to gather the largest shards.

  “Leave it,” the cook ordered in a firm but friendly manner. “Go. Git. I’ll see you’re paid till seven o’clock. Go watch a picture show. Relax.”

  Toni Jo rose with a feeble smile, her cheeks flushed from the day’s exertion. Big Jake, tired and greasy-faced, gazed at Toni Jo with rheumy eyes. Holding the grillbrick up in one hand, he wore the stunned look of a bull just after a sledgehammer smashes its forehead with the meaning of life. Toni Jo finally saw how tired he was. She approached Jake, reached up to his cheek with a gathered edge of her apron, then planted a kiss on the spot she had cleared for her lips.

  “Thanks, Jake,” she said. “You’re a life saver.”

  When she grabbed the strap of her purse and slid it off the desk, the tug reminded Toni Jo of the dollar, the largest tip she had ever received. Instantly, she became mildly happy and faintly melancholic.

  She stepped out the door, then, head down, turned left automatically, oblivious to her surroundings. Halfway across the lot, someone called to her.

  “Say, angel,” the voice said. Toni Jo wheeled about. It was the new man, leaning on the ample and curvaceous body of a cream-colored Studebaker. Propped up stork-like, the heel of his right shoe hooked on the chrome bumper, he waved.