Candles Burning

Fifty-four

GRADY found me crouched on the beach, trading pieces of a peanut butter sandwich with my current Rocky Raccoon, for oysters. Grady had two cold Straight Eights by their necks. It was just twilight, so I didn’t need my hat.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey back.”

I had my oyster knife in my shorts and swiftly shucked the oysters from their shells. I gave some to Grady and swallowed some myself.

We chased the oysters with long draughts from the Straight Eights. I told Grady about catching Mama going through my drawer and how I wanted to get in touch with my brother. I had not told anyone what Miz Verlow had said about me going away, and didn’t know how or when I was going to be able to tell Grady.

I asked him, “You see Betelgeuse?”

He was hopeless. He never could see what I saw in the sky.

“Nope. Ain’t your mama got an address or a phone number nor nothin’?”

I shook my head.

“So you don’t even know where he is?”

“No, sir.”

“You sirring me?” Grady mock-cuffed me.

He wanted to go canoodle on the beach. We had our place. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do so I took his hand and we went down the beach and found it again. Grady wasn’t so skinny as he used to be; he was starting to fill out to be a man. It felt good to be close to him and have his arms around me.

“You got any ideas?” he asked me. “Ma’am.”

I mock-cuffed him back. “Watch it, you!” I leaned back into his arms. “No I ain’t got any ideas.”

The silence between us lengthened pleasantly and after a while I realized that Grady had dozed off. I poked him in the ribs.

He smacked his lips together. “Damn.”

“I need some money,” I said.

“Me too. Wanna hold up a bank?”

“You can try it, you want. I’m gone have to bust the Nickel Account, enough for a bus ticket to and from Tallassee. I can find out where Ford is if I go there, I know I can. I’ll go right to Dr. Evarts and demand to see my brother.”

Grady scratched his head. “I like to go but I got to work.”

“Not right now,” I said. “But soon, when I get the time off.”

I hadn’t ever asked for time off and hadn’t even considered if I should tell Miz Verlow what I wanted to do with the time or not.

“You won’t need a bus ticket,” Grady said. “We caint use my wheels, it taint reliable enough, but maybe we could borrow the station wagon, or even Roger’s daddy’s Edsel that used to be your mama’s.”

“You’re a genius,” I told Grady. “Sir.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Put your pants on, less go get some more beer.”

While Grady collected the rest of the beer in his Dodge, I went into the house and found Miz Verlow in the kitchen making a cup of tea, and begged the use of the station wagon for an errand.

“Beer run?”

“Yes’m.”

She tipped her chin at the hook where the keys to the wagon hung. “That boy’s vehicle is a deathtrap. You drive. You hold your beer better than he does.”

I had an urge to kiss her but when I started to rise up on my bare toes, she gave me an appalled look.

“Put some shoes on, Calley,” she said. “You oughtn’t drive with bare feet.”

I never have figured out what’s so bad about driving with bare feet.

“Miz Verlow,” I said, as I began to bag some leftovers for snacks, “do you remember Mama’s mama talking to us from the dead when I was a little girl?”

She gave me a long steady look. “So you remember.”

“Yes’m.”

“Do you remember me asking you just afterward if you could hear the dead?”

I nodded.

“You told me that you did. You didn’t understand them.”

“No’m. I did not. Most of ’em. I mean, I understood what Mamadee said.” Another memory surfaced. “Cosima,” I said, “Mama’s grandmama, she spoke to me twice. On a Christmas Eve. And then.” I felt myself jumping off a cliff. “Then Tallulah Jordan came to the door.”

Miz Verlow blinked at the name Tallulah Jordan.

“Who the hell is Tallulah Jordan?” she asked, with an edge of mockery in her voice.

“A ghost, like Mamadee was, and like my great-grandmama Cosima.”

Miz Verlow blinked again.

“I want to talk to you, in my room,” she said. “Tell Grady to go wherever he calls home.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m gone with Grady right now.”

Miz Verlow’s lips tightened with anger. Her eyes livened with an almighty piss-off at me. I noted it with a smug adolescent satisfaction. It didn’t occur to me that it was another moment like the one in which Mrs. Mank offered to tell me a secret and I declined. Then I declined out of fear. This time I was exercising my independence.

Miz Verlow took her teacup and stalked out of the kitchen without another word.

I picked up some sandals where I’d left them on the verandah. Grady was already lounging in the wagon’s passenger seat. He shoved in the cigarette lighter and lit a Camel that he couldn’t afford. Then again, he couldn’t afford a cracker or the Cheez Whiz to spurt onto it.

I dropped the paper sack of leftovers in his lap.

“Comestibles,” I said.

He poked around in the sack.

“Com-estibles,” he said. “I like that word.”

We got some more beer in the village and parked down on Pensacola Beach. Grady greased up his fingers on leftover rib roast and then stickied them eating pecan pie out his hand.

He chased the chow with half a longneck and then belched.

I giggled.

He held out his left hand and I licked his fingers clean. Then he twisted around so I could clean the other one.

“Damn,” he said. “That’s horny.”

I took a mouthful of the contents of the longneck I was holding between my legs and sprayed it at him. He just laughed.

Grady and me, we had some good times. I wouldn’t ever be surprised to find out that he was related somehow to the Dakins.