Lamma's Night (anthology)

door, looking at her (there were no customers in the soda shop just then, and Willie, having finished his useless cleaning of the front window, had gone in search of a boy's adventure while his father was away down the street buying cigars at the tobacco shop), appraising her from beneath his dark hair, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans so that his fingers pointed at and echoed the pubic saddle that lay beneath the blue cloth, and

'Mornin', Greta,' he said, and she looked up from the rag she had been using to polish the countertop, but not really, because she had been looking up all along, though not so that anyone would have noticed (or so she had hoped), and she said

'Can I get you anything, Jimmy?' And he, thumbs still hooked, fingers still pointing, shook his head.

'I jus' come to check on my little one.'

'You don't even know there is a little one.'

'My father would've had a little one, and I'm like my father, girl. We's all magic men in my family. My father was a magic man, my grandfather was a magic man, and I'm a magic man, too. Just like in the song.'

She turned her head away. That was what had been playing on her radio when he had come to her window that night, silently, like a cat, and scratching like her own cat waiting to be let in, except that when she had unlatched the fastening and slid the lower sash up, standing in her nightgown with her hair all loose around her shoulders and not even underwear on, she had seen, instead of white cat paws, a man's hands reaching for the sill and she had not had time even to think (though she was still not sure, between the forced episodes of whiteness, what she should have thought at the time, or what she could have done except say no, and even that would have been as nothing since it had been Jimmy White coming in through her window, and everyone knew who his father was and how his father had, in his prime, like his father before him, sired child after child upon any number of women scattered throughout Oktibushubee County, sired them perhaps in just this way [the shameful births hushed up and secret, families raising the cuckoo birds as their own so that by now no one knew who might be related to whom], just as everyone knew—just as she knew—that her father worked at the bank that Mr. Gavin had left in trust to his wife until she died and then to the faceless and nameless group of investors and backers in Chicago who administered that trust, who, upon her death, would acquire ownership of it, and that Mr. Gavin and Vinty White had in common a great-grandmother somewhere up north) before Jimmy had been in her room.

'You puttin' on weight?'

'Maybe I am, and maybe I ain't. None of your business, anyway.' And he, still lounging at the door, his thumbs still hooked in his pockets and not having moved an inch, said

'It's my business, all right. That little one, boy or girl, is mine, and you'll take care of it.' And she, not looking at him, or rather, keeping herself from looking at him with anything more than the corner of her eye

'There ain't no little one.'

And he laughed and said

'Sure there ain't.'

'There ain't.'

'You jus' take care of it. Boy or girl, it's mine. And I'll tell you, it's a boy, too. I know, 'cause I'm a magic man. All the men in my family are magic men. I know it's a boy, and I'll know if you don't take care of him.'

And before he left, he went to the jukebox at the side wall, stuck in a quarter, and paid for three repetitions of the Heart song so that she would have to listen to it again, and again, and again, the engine of his truck roaring behind the music, his tires scratching and sliding on the unpaved street as he pulled out, slewed around, and headed on out of town toward the highway and the house of his father.

She heard a siren later on, but she did not think much about it, because there were always a few things that would make Sheriff Wallace turn on his siren, even if he would not turn it on for Jimmy White no matter how often he drove like one who had been snakebit. More than likely it was something simple, something common: someone from out of town who had run the stop sign that everyone knew was hidden behind the ivy bush at Duncan and Main, maybe, or a cat up a tree somewhere, as her own cat had been that April morning when she had gone out to look for it and had found it hanging terrified from the high, leafless branches of the frost-rimed maple into which Jimmy's attentions had driven it the night before when he, afterward, had come scratching at her window, imitating it perfectly as though he had been listening to it for days, planning for just the evening when her mother and her father would be out at the movie theater, planning it so that she herself would open the window so that even if she said anything (and he knew she would not) he could say that she had let him in herself, planning it and waiting and then doing something to the cat to keep it out of the way and coming instead himself.

But when Mr. McCoy's cigar, fresh from the tobacco store (his son Willie having, by adolescent prescience, arrived back in the soda shop just ahead of him so as to continue the deception that he had been on the premises and working the whole time) had driven her into the bathroom to kneel at the stained toilet and heave dryly from a stomach that had already been emptied from just such heaving an hour before, she could not help but think of the wished-for, enforced whiteness in her mind that had been shattered now by Jimmy's visit, by his questions, by the hook of his thumbs in his pockets and the point of his fingers at his crotch, and of the inevitability of what would happen to her, a dictated fate just as inescapable as that which had, last April, been forcing the buds into existence on the branches of the peach and the apple and the dark dogwood of the forests that even Vinty White could not put a mill in for the quicksand that was there; nor could she forget his words that had conveyed that morning, as they had conveyed that April evening when he had come in through her window, that same inevitability: his magic, shared as though consubstantially with his father and his grandfather; his arrogance and his willingness to plant his seed widely and even indiscriminately among the women of Oktibushubee County, knowing as he did so that that same magic, or maybe a different land of magic—the magic of money, the pollinating, fertilizing touch of coin and bill and draft—protected him from all consequence and repercussion; his declaration (for it was a declaration, not a wish, a promise rather than a hope) that there was a child (and there was) and that it was a boy (and it would be); and his unspoken pronouncement, felt by her rather than uttered or maybe even thought of by him, that, as his father was like his grandfather, and as he was like his father, so the child would be like him, and that she would see that child grow to a swaggering manhood in which he would drive a truck and scratch at windows and plant his seed with as much arrogant skill and inevitability as Jimmy himself

or maybe not, for near closing time, when Mr. McCoy had left the soda shop once again, this time to journey up the street for beer with his friends, and Willie McCoy had vanished again too, Mrs. Gavin's old DeSoto came back down the street. But instead of driving by, solemn and funereal, leaving behind it only a white pall as though in token of oriental and cryptic mourning, it pulled to the curb right in front of the soda shop and stopped. And now Mrs. Gavin herself was getting out—furs despite the heat and diamonds maybe because of it (flashing icy in the pall of whiteness)—and coming into the store.

But she was a lady, and she would not sit at the counter like a man or a hoyden, and so she took a chair at one of the marble-topped tables that Mr. McCoy had had trucked in all the way from Biloxi, trucked in and placed on