On my strolls up Mercedes Street to the Monkey Ward warehouse and back (always with a newspaper folded open to the rental section of the classifieds), I spotted Mr. Hazzard, a hulk in his mid-thirties, the two kids Rosette wouldn’t play with, and an old woman with a frozen face who dragged one foot as she walked. Hazzard’s mama eyed me suspiciously from the mailbox on one occasion, as I idled slowly past along the rut that served as a sidewalk, but she didn’t speak.
On my third recon, I saw a rusty old trailer hooked to the back of Hazzard’s pickup truck. He and the kids were loading it with boxes while the old lady stood nearby on the just-greening crabgrass, leaning on her cane and wearing a stroke-sneer that could have masked any emotion. I was betting on utter indifference. What
I was trying to figure out if there was any foolproof way to do that as we went about our Saturday shopping chores. On one level I was responding to Sadie, making the right comments, kidding her when she spent too much time at the dairy case, pushing the cart loaded with groceries out to the parking lot, putting the bags in the Ford’s trunk. But I was doing it all on autopilot, most of my mind worrying over the Fort Worth logistics, and that turned out to be my undoing. I wasn’t paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth, and when you’re living a double life, that’s dangerous.
As I drove back to Sadie’s place with her sitting quietly (too quietly) beside me, I was singing because the Ford’s radio was on the fritz. The valves had gotten wheezy, too. The Sunliner still looked snappy, and I was attached to it for all sorts of reasons, but it was seven years downstream from the assembly line and there were over ninety thousand miles on the clock.
I carried Sadie’s groceries into the kitchen in a single load, making heroic grunting noises and staggering for effect. I didn’t notice that she wasn’t smiling, and had no idea that our little period of greening was over. I was still thinking about Mercedes Street, and wondering what kind of a show I’d have to put on there — or rather, how much of a show. It would be delicate. I wanted to be a familiar face, because familiarity breeds disinterest as well as contempt, but I didn’t want to stand out. Then there were the Oswalds. She didn’t speak English and he was a cold fish by nature, all to the good, but 2706 was still awfully close. The past might be obdurate but the future was delicate, a house of cards, and I had to be very careful not to change it until I was ready. So I’d have to—
That was when Sadie spoke to me, and shortly after that, life as I had come to know it (and love it) in Jodie came crashing down.
“George? Can you come in the living room? I want to talk to you.”
“Hadn’t you better put your hamburger and pork chops in the fridge? And I think I saw ice cr—”
I turned to her, but she was already in the living room. She picked up her cigarettes from the table beside the couch and lit one. At my gentle urgings she had been trying to cut down (at least around me), and this seemed somehow more ominous than her raised voice.
I went into the living room. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”
“Everything. What was that song?”
Her face was pale and set. She held the cigarette in front of her mouth like a shield. I began to realize that I had slipped up, but I didn’t know how or when, and that was scary. “I don’t know what you m—”
“The song you were singing in the car when we were coming home. The one you were bellowing at the top of your lungs.”
I tried to remember and couldn’t. All I could remember was thinking I’d always have to dress like a slightly down-on-his-luck workman on Mercedes Street, so I’d fit in. Sure I’d been singing, but I often did when I was thinking about other things — doesn’t everybody?
“Just some pop thing I heard on KLIF, I guess. Something that got into my head. You know how songs do that. I don’t understand what’s got you so upset.”
“Something you heard on K-Life. With lyrics like ‘I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis, she tried to take me upstairs for a ride’?”
It wasn’t just my heart that sank; everything below my neck seemed to drop five inches. “Honky Tonk Women.” That’s what I’d been singing. A song that wouldn’t be recorded for another seven or eight years, by a group that wouldn’t even have an American hit for another three. My mind had been on other things, but still — how could I have been so dumb?
“‘She blew my nose and then she blew my mind’? On the
