The Gin Girl

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Excerpt

Chapter One

            The night I had the dream, I was in Memphis.  It was unbearably hot, made hotter by the   fact that there had been no warning of the coming heat. From the comfortable air of a languid southern winter, to a furnace blast like the dog days of August, we were engulfed by humidity. There arose in the city a communal understanding: we were all being assaulted by the same curse. Strangers would look at each other on the streets or in bars and shake their heads as if to say ‘Why? What have we done to deserve this? But there was no answer forthcoming, although I occasionally suspected it was because of something I had left undone. Something of primary importance, overlooked on my part, for which the entire southern region was now having to pay penance.

            To hide from the heat, I sat in front of the air conditioner in my pay-by-the-week motel room. a dingy end-of-the-line where I watched the flowered wallpaper peel while I drank Jack Daniels from a plastic cup. On the weekends I tended bar at place call Seals. It was easy. I didn't have to look good. I didn't have to make small talk. I didn't have to smile, and I still got paid enough to get by and drink Black Jack and smoke Marlboros instead of generic I didn't think as much as I had the time to.

            The night that changed things had been a regular night. One filled with regular customers at their regular seats crying in their regular drinks. Occasionally, some new face walked in searching for a bar to call home. Eventually, all the faces looked the same drawn and pale with suggestion of sweat. Some sat huddled away in booths, seclusion providing a blanket from whatever had driven them out of their lives. Others found solace at the bar, sitting on stools, desperate for conversation regardless of how disparaging or remote mine might be. In their inds, the lose proximity of my presence offered at least a hint of hope, like someone who sat outside a church looking in thinking, Maybe, just maybe.

            "There are better choices," I wanted to tell them. "Go to Huck's place. He'll remember your name and talk in his loud, shout-the-world-down voice and ring his bar bell whether he gets a big tip or he doesn't. Huck likes a lot of noise. It's all so alive. Go there if that's what you're seeking." But incessantly, they were drawn to the damp darkness of my own face because it matched their own. The bar had a manager, Tom Ricks, which meant he also had regular seat. His was at the end of the bar where he drank scotch with a splash, but as the night wore on, the splash wore off, and he was usually drunk by the time we closed.

            I locked the door, counted what little money the register held, and put it in the floor safe. Tom said, "You're a good kid," even though we were about the same age. I said, "Oh yeah, I'm a good kid," and dumped the tips in my bag without counting them. I re-locked the door behind me started the short walk home thinking about the heat and how it might be my fault. Seals was surrounded by bars of the same type, a few pool halls and a scattering of run-down stores: a women's dress shop from a different era, a tattoo parlor offering body piercing, a T-shirt shop that smelled of incense, and the odd assortment of motels that had been turned into a pay-as you-go arrangement like mine.

            I opened the door to my room, closed it behind me and then sat in the only chair, my feet propped on the corner of the bed, smoking and letting the houses at Seals fall away. From somewhere nearby, a blues riff filtered its way out to the sidewalk, rolled a few feet and died; we were a long way from the gates of Graceland. Intermittently, cars drove past throwing shadows against the walls. The lights ran over and over the tiny closet revealing the few pitful hangers and the white flash of a work shirt. Even in the darkness, the room old and tired and sorry to be alive. It had been so long since I had stayed in one place. for no reason without explanations, I would leave one city and plow into a new but slight variation on the last. It kept me separate and barren like an estranged, futile fugitive. Now, I had enough miles on me to die. And I felt them. Every year, every inch encroaching with stealth as though death would catch me unaware and succeed when I wasn't looking. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

            During the course of those numbing hours, in the midst of the half-world of my mind, I began dreaming. In the dream I was a child, playing on the beach with Joe, catching crabs and turning them loose, collecting shells until our pile grew into a castle, until the castle rew into the world, the salt sitting heavy on our tongues and our skin, and we were laughing like we used to. But in the dream the sky grew suddenly dark and I could see my father calling me, waving as though he were trying to warn me of some encroaching danger. But he wind would take his breath away so that I couldn't hear him. He kept waving and waving. The sky was growing darker, the waves grew angry, the spray from them cold and stinging. Then Joe began sinking as though the sand were eathing him alive, the gaping hole of an unseen animal pulling him below the surface. He was up to his waist before I grabbed him by the hands and pulled with all my might, but I was so small and the sand was eating him so fast. It was to his shoulders, and then above his chin. Then with one last desperate look, he was completely gone, and I was crying and digging and digging with a freezing wind blowing cold until I shivered and couldn't stop. Then someone said, "Mary, its time to come home," and I turned to see my father, but he just wasn't right, and I woke with my heart beathing against the silence of the room.

            I could still hear this voice hanging in the air, the words running along my skin so that the tiny hairs stood up, and I looked around expecting to see him as I lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. Toliquilah had surfaced.

            There is no place in the whole world like the island of Toliquilah. To some people it doesn't even exist, concealing and revealing itself to whom it chooses. To those of us who were born there, it refuses to let us go, as though we are intertwined. And secretly, I know this to be true. We are. I looked at my hands outlined against the darkness, the strength undeniable, the gracefulness surprising, and I saw before me great green vines wapping around old oak trunks as though, over the discourse of time, we grew together, overlaping one another, the island absorbing the very folds of person, place and thing with a sleepy ease so that Percy Falls, who walked back-crooked and looked at you under the leaves of his lidded eyes, might as well have been one of the twisted oaks that grew in the grove. The same was true for Redbeard Mahoney, who was and still is the largest man I've ever known, like swamp cypress growing straight up, unbending. Even that ogre of a woman Lolly Eden blended with the island when her teeth became as cracked as her concrete motel.

            Everyone always understood the affiliation between the living things that moved on Toliquilah and the living things that didn't. Everyone, that is, except my mother. "We aren't Jesus and can't walk on water," she would say through irritated teeth pointed at my father's back. She never spoke of Jesus otherise and didn't seem to know much about him, but she was quick to point out who we weren't. It as the beginning of a one-sided argument about why we lived in the middle of "dirty water and good for nothing sand."

            To my father and me, our home was both mystery and celebration.

            My father was a fisherman by trade. it was the second thing my mother couldn't take away from him. The first was me. i was dedicated to big Black Jack, as they called him, although he was not a black man, but he had black eyes and black hair which he refused to cut no matter what my mother called him. He wore it braided way down his back, and his skin was like dark burnished copper. It was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. At some point in her life, surely my mother had agreed.

            In the good days, when my father and I possessed the freedom that comes from a life without the constraints of time or demands of schedule, I would sit on his boat for hours as he scrubbed away particles of dead sea or mended a piece of wood, bonding and painting with quiet, strong hands. We didn't speak much because we didn't have to; him being Black Jack and me being his daughter, and us both living the same life, there wasn't much need of conversation. That was our best time, before my mother's diseased spirit slowly poisoned the essence of ourlives. And finally, when her sullen anger climbed to an orchestrated pitch, accompanied with shouts and slamming doors, I knew I had to leave. i traveled back just often enough to see the silent deterioration of my father's face and my mother's becoming stronger as if, by the warpness of her shrewd tongue, she was sucking the very marrow from his bones, adding it to her own.

            Once, on a rare visit, we waited until she was dead asleep; stole out the back door, holding the screen so's not to slam it; and let the Ford pick-up roll down the driveway without the lights on. Then we stopped at the liquor store and bought the largest bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label they had, my father's choice of brands having blended with his name, and drove on through the grove to the other side of the swamp and out through the marsh grass till the water almost came up through the doors. Then we didn't worry about anything anymore; instead, we sat and watched the moon rising over the shadows of the herons and their huge nests built in the top of swamp trees.

            I wanted to ask him, "Why'd you ever marry her? You being Indian and her being contrary, why?"

            But he would have just shrugged and took another drink and told me, "There's no such thing as why." so we just drank, and I didn't ask. Then the frongs got loud to the point of crazy. THen they shut up.

            We got back just before sunrise, both of us drunk enough to pass out, but we didn't. My father decided to go fishing, and I said good bye and laid across my old bed without getting undressed, listening to my mother's breathing getting shallower and shallower as she approached the surface of awake.

            Three months later to the day, my father died. My mother had him embalmed over the bridge in Clark City where she planned to bury him in  the dirt. She picked out a cheap pine box, setting her eyes sideways to get my reaction, but I figure pine would work just fine.

            While she wore a black dress and dabbed at her eyes in the funeral parlor, me and Joe loaded the coffin from the hearse to the Ford and drove down Highway 2 over "No-good" bridge, through the grove and right out onto the marsh grass till the water almost came up through the doors. Then we lifted the casket, which was heavy for Joe but not for me and I didn't wonder why, and lugged it over to the cypress trees where we'd rigged up a pine cradle the night before.

            it was just big enough to hold the coffin. We put him up there just right so he wouldn't fall out, doused him with gasoline and Jack Daniels and set fire to the whole thing. Then we watched the smoke rise and listened to the pine pop when the fire hit a knot while we polished off the bottle.

            We should have gotten into trouble, but by the time anyone put the missing body and all the other pieces together, they were afraid to mention it. I guess they thought we'd be just as quick to do the same to them, dead or undead.

            My mother sold the house so cheaply she might as well have given it away. it didn't matter to me. He wasn't in it anymore. Then she moved to Birmingham and lost thirty pounds and married a dentists. That was the last I ever heard about her.

            Before she died, my aunt, Black Jack's sister, told me about the night I was born, about how she had been there in the room with my father, about how he watched the way my mother held me, the twisting flesh of her flesh, with a look of both hatred and possession. She said Jack had had a premonition of the years to come and tried to say, "We should never have married," but part of it got choked with the revelations, and all my mother heard was "marry."

            "Fine," she said, "Mary, it is," so relieved she was that my name wasn't something that sounded more like "moon child of the dog."

            After my father died, I lived my life in rented rooms like the one in memphis and between odd jobs like Seals. Then, the night during the heat wave I had the dream, and with my father's voice still ringing in my ears, i packed my bags and headed home.

            Between sleeping and slleep-driving, I crossed the "No-good" t four p.m. on Thursday, the seventeenth. It was hot like it is in August except it was February. I hadn't escaped the heat wave but met in its prime. The air was thick, a substance all its own. you can't walk very fast when the air takes on that shape. You can try, but you can't do it.

            I drove down the narrow two-lane and thought about things that had been, never expecting what was to come. Then I lit my last cigarette and drove to Lemuel's to replenish whatt was left of me.

            Lemuel used to have a sign that would light up red at night that simply said, "LEMUELS'S," but a woman he had lived with for seven years got mad and shot it out. That was the year before she took fifty dollars out of the cash register  without asking and left him.

            Lemuel was a crossbreed, but nobody knew what with, and nobody could ever understand a word he said. He had come to Toliquilah a grown man, a long time ago, and bought the old fish shop with some kind of insurance money, somebody had said, and turned it into the liquor store. I opened the door, and with one look he lifted a bottle of Jack Daniels from the shelf, held it to his mouth and blew the dust off the glass before he shoved it in the sack. That was Lemuel's way of doing business.

            "How's it goin' Lemuel?" His little black and white television erupted and tried to say something the same time he did, making his answer even more muffled than usual. Then he started mumble-preaching at me, and I pointed behind his head, "Gimme two packs of Marlboro's."

            "Gone too long, too late. Joe done gone too, don't you know. Woman next door next door done took the place. Change name no good. Ain't got but one good arm. Other one long done gone. Now whatchagonnado?"

            Then we stood eyeball to eyeball, me trying to decipher and Lemuel waiting for an answer I wanted to ask, "What's goin on here, Lemuel? What sleeping creature has awakened? Who is it that calls me home? But his answers would fall like jumbled bones upon my ears, so instead I said, "You too, Lemuel," and pushed my way out the door to walk across to the water.

            I at on the sand, opened the bottle, and watched the first real sunset I'd seen in a very long time. Home will remind you of where you've been, but couldn't care less where you're going. Sitting there drinking Black Jack, watching the stars come out one piece at a time, I didn't care either. I thought about his place which was  full of magic and all the place I'd been which weren't. Then I wished I could hold my breath and time would stand still and I'd be in a safe place forever.

            it could happen on Toliquilah. time stopping. I know this because it happened to me once while I was sitting on Black Jacks's boat as he was working. He had started to sing a song that rose up from deep within his chest and hung in the air as he moved his hands over the boat hull. I had never known that he knew his native tongue. perhpas, in some peculiar way, neither did he. And yet on this day, that ancient mystery within himself remembered who he was, where he'd come from and by the power of its being, in some seamless way, halted the earth a moment into stillness. it sounded like a lullaby, and I closed my eyes, leaned my face into the sun, and rocked back and forth until the music finished and faded out across the water.

            But time wasn't stopping now. It was pressing on as the night grew darker and the sky became an endless shelter of lights. I lay back on the still warm sand, closed my eyes, and rifted off to sleep.

The foregoing is excerpted from The Gin Girl by River Jordan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from Livingston Press , University of West Alabama, Station 22, Livingston, Alabama 35470