A Savage Wisdom Page 3

  “Hey!” she said, paralyzed in her tracks. He smiled at her for several seconds, then, as if she were across a field instead of ten yards away, invited her over into talking range with two sweeping waves of his hand. She stopped five feet away, the distance country people keep when talking to strangers. Neither said anything for a few moments. Focusing on the kite scar between the man’s eyes, Toni Jo swung the purse around her thighs, its weight reminding her.

  “Say, thanks for the tip.” She looked up, one eye squinted against the setting sun.

  The new man suppressed a smile, took a last drag from his cigarette, then snapped it across the lot. They watched the tumbling white bullet hit and roll to a stop, sending up a languid spiral of smoke.

  “It wasn’t meant for a tip,” he said, looking squarely at her. “It was a gift. A beautiful lady for a beautiful lady.” His foot dropped to the pavement. “What’s your name?”

  “Toni Jo.” The man tilted his face skyward and let out a laugh, full-bodied and long.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Toni Jo? Are you kidding me? It sounds like the name of a poodle.”

  Embarrassed, slightly offended, Toni Jo dug at a bottle cap embedded in the packed, oily dirt with the toe of her shoe. She tucked a long lock of auburn-brown hair behind her ear.

  “It’s my name,” she said matter-of-factly, looking at his neck, searching there for some indicator of the man’s age: thirty, she guessed, though his skin revealed he never worked a day in his life. “What’s yours?”

  He looked at her as if he were going down a list to pick out one she would like.

  “Harold,” he said.

  “Harold,” she repeated blankly. “Harold what?”

  “Harold-Harold,” he said. “What difference does it make?”

  Toni Jo shrugged her right shoulder slightly and ticked her head to that side.

  “Nice car,” she said. The man stepped away from the vehicle and put his hands in the deep pockets of his slacks. They admired the automobile. The man lightly kicked a tire. He rattled his keys in one pocket and some change in the other.

  Toni Jo said, “What kind of business you in, anyway?” Way glided into two syllables, way-ee.

  The man who called himself Harold thought for a moment. “The money-making kind—what other kind is there? The only thing wrong with money is that you and I don’t have enough of it.”

  “You can say that again,” Toni Jo replied.

  “And I’ll bet if you had five hundred dollars you wouldn’t be working at that two-rat cafe.”

  Toni Jo examined the cafe, a large crack in the window patched with tape.

  “I been eatin’ here since I was a kid. It’s a nice place.”

  “To you, it’s a nice place. To anyone else, it’s a joint. You ever been to a real restaurant?”

  “I was in Shreveport once, the Andalusia.”

  “I know it,” Harold said. “It’s okay.”

  “Okay?” Toni Jo said. “What’s your idea of a nice restaurant?”

  “Antoine’s, New Orleans. Bord du Lac, Baton Rouge. Vic’s in Lake Charles. There’s good barbecue at the White Kitchen in Slidell. They’re on my route. I’m in new territory this week, terra incognita.”

  “Where’s that?” Toni Jo asked, thinking it was the name of a restaurant she hadn’t heard about.

  “That’s a good one,” the man chuckled. “Terra Incognita. If I ever open a restaurant, I’ll call it that.”

  Toni Jo blushed at her ignorance. “Beautiful girls should be smart, too,” her mother used to tell her. Now she knew why.

  “Listen,” the man said, “I’ll be back this way in a couple of weeks. Would you mind—. Could I see you again?”

  Toni Jo tried to read his expressionless face. Disappointed, she nodded mechanically.

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “Well, maybe two or three,” the man said. They both looked off in the distance.

  Toni Jo thought for a while. “I don’t think I’m planning any long vacations.”

  The man walked around to the driver’s side of his car and said across the rooftop, “Well, keep your chin up. With a face like that”—his eyes followed the outline of her body down to her ankles—”you’d be surprised where you could go.”

  Toni Jo, who had heard such statements her entire life, was convinced that, unlike her other admirers, this man knew what he was talking about.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The man slid into the seat and started the car. He ducked his head and called through the open passenger window. “Just stating a fact.”

  “Thanks all the same,” Toni Jo said. Harold dropped the car into gear and let up on the clutch, easing the Studebaker onto the highway.

  “Hey!” she yelled. He slowed and craned his neck out the window. She held her purse up. “Thanks for the gift!”

  He pointed at her as the sedan moved onto the blacktop, his face quaking with laughter that Toni Jo couldn’t hear for the roar of the engine taking him away.

  Chapter Three

  April 1938

  “Dollface,” Ray Boy called. “Hey, Toni Jo, wake up.” He put two fingers to his lips and whistled sharply. “Hey, Hey!”

  She finally snapped to. “Sorry, Ray, I guess I was somewhere else.”

  “Well, wherever it was, I probbly been there a few times myself. How ’bout a slice of that lemon pie?”

  A week had passed since the new man had stolen away. Deliriously happy, Toni Jo felt certain somehow that he was the man she had been destined to meet, to live and die with. She had written a long entry in her diary on the night they met, the sameness of the previous month represented by blank pages.

  Then she reread passages about her old boyfriends. She always had dates to the major events at school and church—banquets, homecomings, proms—but most of her escorts she thought of as brothers. She had known the boys all their lives. On the porch, Toni Jo let them kiss her good night, and she returned a kiss so short and obligatory that the boys felt they had in fact been kissed by their sister, and though they continued to remark on her beauty, they never asked her out again.

  Then there was Rusty: Walter Thomas Lewis. A three-sport man. Toni Jo loved the way he looked in his uniforms and letter sweater. When most guys wore their hair slicked back over their ears with Wildroot, he kept his dry and let the brick-red waves fall naturally on his forehead. Rusty went through half a dozen girls per year like an impatient, hard-to-fit man trying on shirts.

  No one called Walter Thomas Lewis by his given names. An only son, he was referred to as “the Lewis boy” by other parents and “Wally Tom” by his three older sisters.

  Rusty was a year older than Toni Jo. She had been watching him since moving to the high school. On the first day of her junior year, he walked into Mr. Jones’s geometry class. Toni Jo’s heart bolted when his eyes locked onto her and he walked straight for the empty seat behind hers. When he kissed Toni Jo at her door two Friday nights later, she felt a pleasurable pain in her chest, as if it were a balloon someone had blown up too tight.

  After Rusty and Toni Jo had been dating for three months, Mrs. Henry complimented her daughter on her choice but cautioned that, although she might believe Rusty was special, he was like all young fellows and might press her too far. Her mother never told her, but Toni Jo was an eight-month baby, and that constant reminder was Mrs. Henry’s secret diploma representing her infallible knowledge regarding the ways of boys and men.

  Toni Jo sat in obedient and total humiliation before her mother. It was expected of her. Still, she felt disappointed by, almost resented, her mother’s lack of trust. Weeks back, Toni Jo had promised her she would never let Rusty take her into the Star Theater’s balcony, traditionally the colored section. Mother and daughter never exchanged specific words, but their eyes, in unspoken, intimate rapport, communicated that each knew of the compromised reputation of girls who did such things.

  So Toni Jo could not have exp
lained to her own, much less to her mother’s satisfaction why the next Saturday she and Rusty ascended the carpeted stairs and entered the mysterious darkness the locals called Nigger Heaven. It was the first showing of It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Lit by the dusty blue cone of light spraying from the projector, Rusty waved to a couple of guys and their girlfriends as he and Toni Jo passed them on their way to the highest tier. Occupying a love seat, Toni Jo wedged her purse into the folded chair to her right while Rusty pulled something from his letter sweater.

  “Psst!” he said in order to get the attention of a knot of colored boys five rows down. “Psst!” When one of them glanced back, Rusty waved him towards the love seat. The boy pointed to his chest with a frightened look on his face. Rusty nodded and waved more forcefully as if to say, “Come on up, I won’t bite you.”

  The boy began briskly and slowed as he neared, coming to a full stop three steps from the couple. Swiveled around in their seats, his friends watched and giggled at him. One made a farting noise, and they all disappeared from view laughing uproariously.

  “Here,” Rusty said, holding up his Coke cup. “Want some of this?”

  The boy nodded quickly.

  “Get a cup.”

  The boy ducked between two rows of seats and hunted around on the floor until he spied a discarded cup and retrieved it. At what he considered a safe distance from the white man, he reached the cup as far as he could. Without touching the boy’s cup, Rusty poured half of his Coke into the crumpled, dirty container.

  Mock gruffly, Rusty said, “You know who I am, boy?”

  “Yassur. You Rusty Lewis. That plays football at the high school. You a right fast runner.”

  “Damn straight. Now get your tiny butt down there with your friends and I don’t want to hear a peep outa y’all for the rest of the night, you hear?”

  The boy grinned big, correctly reading Rusty’s tone, which implied that the two were now buddies. The boy turned to his friends and stuck his tongue out at them.

  Toni Jo was puzzled by all the activity until Rusty brought a half-pint of Old Crow into full view and topped off his cup with the amber contents of the bottle.

  Rusty amused himself during slow scenes by throwing peanut hulls at the smaller colored boys who stayed for two or three features, getting their money’s worth of entertainment and air conditioning. To get back at Rusty, they made loud smooching noises when he and Toni Jo kissed. During scenes when they weren’t kissing and the boys weren’t looking, Rusty brushed his fingers against the thin cotton fabric near Toni Jo’s left breast and, in the silent agreement teenagers employ to salve their consciences and still feel good, she pretended not to know what he was doing.

  By the middle of It Happened One Night, Rusty was rubbing the side of Toni Jo’s breast. When Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert started bedding down in a haystack for the night, Rusty’s hand boldly moved over his date’s shoulder to the front of her dress and began a clumsy massage. Toni Jo pretended total ignorance, hazily thinking that if you refuse to acknowledge it, it can’t be bad. The two kissed while the credits scrolled into the darkness above the screen, ignoring the colored boys making noises at a safe distance.

  Ten minutes later, the projector off, the boys chased out by an usher, the empty theater filled with the haunting quiet of a mausoleum, Rusty snaked his finger between the third and fourth buttons of Toni Jo’s dress and was trying to sneak it under her brassiere for a feel of secret flesh when the illusion burst. With nothing to disguise the blatant move—no metallic human voice from the staticky speakers, no moving light and color on the screen, no lapful of popcorn and candy to serve as excuses not to fend away an errant hand—the impetuous ploy degenerated into a crude and obvious maneuver. Wordlessly, Toni Jo made her objection by returning Rusty’s hand to the front of her dress, implying that that was plenty liberal of her already. His crooning pleas obviously affected Toni Jo, as he judged by her heavy breathing and humid skin, but she held her ground and told him that certain things would have to wait for their engagement.

  Toni Jo did not think the actions of the evening especially significant until at school two days later, when Rusty moved to another seat in their geometry class. Wednesday, she saw him in the hall holding hands with Jeanna Rae. Until Rusty graduated and left for LSU on a football scholarship, he never spoke another word to her.

  * * *

  The new man had been absent two weeks when Toni Jo’s mood shifted from elation to anxiety. He said two weeks, she reminded herself. Or three, Toni Jo remembered. Two or three weeks.

  At night, after a warm bath to cleanse her flawless skin of the day’s sweat and grease, she lay in bed under the cool sheets thinking of him—his Crosby-smooth voice, the scar on his nose, a perfect set of teeth—conjuring up her most intimate physical encounter with Rusty, replacing the boy in her bedtime imaginings with Harold, quickly getting to the part when Harold would slip his hand under her brassiere with suave dexterity, then, after she resisted a bit, touch her there—over the cotton nightgown where her hand had now moved, pressing, squeezing, massaging all around, until she would think, there, there where her hand, suddenly become his, ventured quickly under the cloth to touch the darker, puckered flesh and, frustrated, her conscience throwing a little tantrum, Toni Jo would fling her arms outward on the bed and finally gasp, in the breathless higher regions near tortured ecstasy, “Oh, God, what am I going to do if he doesn’t come back?”

  Chapter Four

  May 1938

  The third week of the new man’s absence, Toni Jo grew despondent. She began to deride herself for her girlish optimism and obtuse naïveté. The man had merely engaged her in a harmless flirtation to entertain himself while on a boring sales route. She almost despised herself for being duped by the charming stranger.

  Still, she thought she could be wrong. In the back of her mind, about where her father would return limping but alive after twenty years, she saw Harold’s cream and silver Studebaker swing onto the parking lot of the Time-Out Cafe, its passenger door flinging open invitingly to sweep her up and carry her away.

  By Monday of the fourth week, Toni Jo dove deep into her depression to feel its full effect and get it over with. She rebuked her pride and, in mini-sermons between waves of customers, reminded herself that she was no better than R.O., T-Boy, Big Jake, and C.T.

  By the end of the week, resigned to the old grind and determined to resurrect her plan to attend the Normal School, Toni Jo had practiced serving the men with such humility and enthusiasm that she caught the contagion of the role she was playing and her old self began to revive.

  Then, when she least expected him, the new man reappeared.

  Toni Jo clocked out at seven that Friday evening. As she swung through the door onto the lot, a man, his face obscured by the shadow of his hat brim, waved at her from a dark blue Packard. She smiled and flipped toward him the politely indifferent wave of one stranger to another and continued walking.

  “Say, angel-face,” he called. She stopped and turned. “I haven’t seen you in a month and this is the welcome I get?” He doffed his hat and said, “It’s me. Harold.”

  Half an hour later, the two sat eating Mrs. Henry’s Friday evening meal of veal cutlets, carrots in white sauce, and mashed potatoes. Taking the new man’s sudden appearance in stride, as if the last interesting thing that would ever happen to her had occurred years ago, Mrs. Henry laid out an extra setting for him.

  The tea poured and helpings doled, the small talk began. Will the country ever get out of this depression? Would Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling this summer? Had there been a conspiracy behind Huey Long’s assassination?

  “What line of work you in?” Mrs. Henry asked at length. That’s what she really wanted to know.

  “The restaurant business,” Harold said, and when that didn’t satisfy Toni Jo’s mother, he added, “I’m starting a small chain of restaurants. They say we’ll be out of this depression any time now.
When people have money, they like to eat out. I want to get the property cheap and be ready when the boom hits.”

  This seemed reasonable enough to Mrs. Henry, who went on to the next question.

  “And where are you from, Mr.—?”

  “Nevers,” the handsome man said softly.

  “Nevers. What an unusual name,” Mrs. Henry sang, putting down her fork, truly interested for the first time that evening. “I don’t think—. No, wait. Wasn’t there a famous Nevers who played football out west somewhere?”

  Nevers had been nodding agreement, as if he were used to this line of questioning.

  “Ernie Nevers,” he said. “Stanford. No relation.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Henry said. “I remember, now that you mention it. Well, then. Where are your folks from?”

  “They passed on a long time ago,” he said, his eyes calmly meeting hers.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Henry said, trying to recover from what she perceived as a social blunder. Then, solicitous, all three talked at once:

  —“I’m so sorry, there was no way for me to know.”

  —“Harold, I had no idea.”

  —“Think nothing of it. It’s not important.”

  Harold Nevers went on to tell of his earliest memories at Boys’ Village, an orphanage in Kilgore, Texas, winning Mrs. Henry’s approval with humorous anecdotes about school and dorm life.

  Toni Jo’s mother slapped her on the arm. “Ain’t he a deal? He’s a card, all right.”

  Mrs. Henry cleared the table and announced her retirement, saying she had to rise early and open the drugstore for Mr. Vincent. An awkward silence followed her departure.

  “Well,” Toni Jo attempted, rising. “I guess I’d better wash these dishes. They’ve been gathering for two days.”

  “Here.” The man pushed his chair back without standing. “I’ll help.”

  “No,” Toni Jo objected. “I wouldn’t think of it. You can talk while I work. I wash dishes all day at the cafe, so it’s nothing. Really. What shall we talk about?”