“Have you had any mental trouble?” asked the doctor.
“Mental?”
“Trouble thinking?”
“Mr. McCorkle and the Lutheran minister say so.”
“The hospital will be able to check on that, too,” said the doctor, with his phone in his hand.
An ambulance picked her up and took her to the hospital, where she stayed for a few days. On the last day, a doctor at the hospital sat by her bed and informed her that the eruption on her face was a thing called yaws.
Of course she didn’t understand much of what he was saying until he got up. “It’s going to be a slow thing,” he said. “That’s about all we can tell you except it’s a rare disease that usually happens in Africa. Have you been in Africa?”
“Africa?”
“The continent of Africa.”
“You mean?…”
“Never mind, Mrs. McCorkle. This is a case that will be written up in medical journals. Do you want your real name and address mentioned in these write-ups?”
“Mizz McCorkle, the Lutheran minister’s daughter from Triumph.”
When she left the hospital, she was given slips of paper and a printed pamphlet, and she was even taken to the Gatlinburg railway station in a taxi.
“So what you got wrong with you?” McCorkle asked when she returned to Triumph.
“They say it’s something called yaws.”
“Well, can they do something for it or is it one a’ those incurable things that git worse?”
She made a baffled noise in her throat.
“Don’t whine about it. We all got to go someday from one thing or another. Now for tonight, I will let you sleep on a pallet downstairs, but tomorrow you’re gonna go stay with the Luther’n minister who brought you into this world. Now what did the doctor in Gatlinburg charge you? I want to know all charges connected with this yaws, so I can set them down in the little black book.”
“The Gatlinburg doctor put me in a hospital.”
“You mean for nothing or is there a charge connected?”
“I asked about that and he said the bill would be mailed.”
“Well, have it mailed to your Luther’n minister dad. He was at least half responsible for your coming into the world and your dead mother the other. And he performed the goddamn wedding between us, which I never respected and now I know why, since I was married to yawsV
At this she broke down and cried a little.
This seemed to infuriate McCorkle.
“Git up off the porch, you and your goddamn yaws, and go lie on your pallet and lock the door from inside. I don’t want a child of mine to come in the room an’ maybe catch this disease which I never even heard of.”
He stood back from her farther than the Gatlinburg doctor had as she entered the house and the downstairs storeroom, where an old mattress was thrown in after her.
Dawn the next day, Barle awoke to the sound of the key to the storeroom being turned in the lock. She sat up on the pallet and saw the door swing open a little.
“Is that you, Tom?”
His response didn’t come from the hall but from halfway up the stairs. “Yeh, you can come out now and git on your way to the Luther’n minister’s house.”
“Oh, Tom, I ain’t made breakfast yet.”
“Don’t bother with that. Nobody wants a breakfast that might be infected with yaws. Under a stone on the porch you will find a list of expenses that this thing will cost. Your trip to the doctor and stay in the hospital. Also me and the children’s. We all got to be tested to find out if you have given us this yaws.”
Barle put on the clothes that she had gone to Gatlinburg in, and then she came out in the hall. “How about the rest of my clothes?” she asked.
“Theyll be delivered to the Luther’n minister’s later by a nigger.”
“Well, good-bye,” said Barle.
She got the long list of expenses and started across Triumph to the Lutheran minister’s house. She guessed the news of her affliction had been spread about the town. On most of the porches she passed, there were people standing and watching and making comments as she went by.
“Hello,” she would say, and, receiving no response, she would say, “Good-bye.”
Barle had not expected to be admitted to the Lutheran minister’s house, and so it was no surprise to her that on the gate was a large printed note reading: BARLE, YOU CANNOT ENTER.
The Lutheran minister’s house was located at the edge of Triumph. There was no building beyond it, just a road that diminished into a trail among tall, coppery weeds. She stood for a while among the weeds, uncertain about whether or not to go farther. Beyond the slope of weeds was a mountain known as Cat’s Back. It was the heat of the sun that finally determined Barle to continue on up the slope and into the shade of the woods.
The shade felt good. There was also a clear stream of water. She cupped some in her hands to wash the sweat off her face and sat down to rest for a while. A family of beavers came out of their residence in the stream and they all looked at her and made friendly barking sounds.
“Hello,” said Barle.
They kept on looking and amiably barking.
She thought to herself, “I guess they don’t notice the yaws.”
Barle did not count the days in the woods on Cat’s Back mountain. But they passed pleasantly for her. She lived on mushrooms and acorns and discovered other edible kinds of nuts and vegetation.
There was a lot of wildlife on Cat’s Back, but none of it seemed to regard her as a victim of yaws. She would imagine that the birds were conversing with her in a friendly fashion, and she talked to the beavers and the raccoons.
She reckoned she had until late fall or winter to survive on Cat’s Back—and she was almost right about that. But the time she’d allotted herself was cut slightly short when she heard a mewing sound and noticed some baby wildcats playing around some great rocks. She smiled and went up to them.
The mother wildcat came out of nowhere right down on her.
“Please, please,” she said, but it was over with quickly.
(Published 1977)
The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen
At thirty-seven Stephen Ashe was the youngest member of the Wall Street law firm of Webster, Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe. He was quite as important a member as any of the four whose surnames comprised the firm’s title and the name Ashe was not included only because it was felt that five names to the title would overload it. The oldest member, fifty-nine-year-old Nathaniel Webster the Fifth, was on his way out, having suffered a stroke the day of President Nixon’s resignation and another on the night of his wedding to his nephew’s adolescent widow from the Arkansas Ozarks. The day that he mistook Larrabee for Smythe in the elevator ascending to the firm’s thirty-second floor offices in the Providential Building, Jerry Smythe had slipped a business card of the firm into Stephen Ashe’s pocket as they went down the elevator for lunch that day, giving Stephen a smiling wink and a slight pat on the butt. When Stephen looked at the card he saw that the name Webster had been scratched and the name Ashe appended to the three remaining, printed on it with a ballpoint pen.
In the next few days the same conniving winks and little butt-pats had been delivered to Stephen by Jack Larrabee and Ralph Eggleston, and so it was now fully apparent to Stephen that there was no dissident voice on the matter, that is, none excepting that of the senior gentleman who was on his way out. Of course it was a bit unnerving the way that Nat Webster hung in. A workday never passed at the law firm without Nat, secretly known as the old hound dog, shouting out exuberantly, his door having banged open, “Pressure down five more points. I’m in the clear!”
Stephen and Jerry Smythe went directly from work every evening to the Ivy League Club, for a splash in the pool, a massage, and a sauna. They each had an interest in keeping physically fit; both were under forty and on good days or evenings didn’t look like they’d been out of law school for more than a couple of years. They undressed in the sam
e cubicle at the club. Smythe would wait until Stephen had found a cubicle that was vacant and gone in it and then Smythe would enter it, too, and as they undressed together, Stephen could hardly ignore how frequently Smythe’s hands would brush against his thighs and, once or twice, even his crotch.
They had their massages on adjoining tables and Stephen’s was administered by a good-looking young Italian, and whenever this masseur’s fingers worked up Stephen’s thighs, Stephen would get an erection. He tried to resist it but he couldn’t. The Italian would chuckle a little under his breath but Smythe would make a loud, jocular comment, such as, “Hey, Steve, who’re you thinking of?”
One Friday evening Stephen replied, “I was thinking of Nat Webster’s little teen-age wife.”
“Oh, did I tell you, she’s got her kid brother up here, he was staying with Nat and her but Nat threw him out on his ass last weekend.”
“Why’d Nat throw him out?”
“Found out he was delinquent.”
“Delinquent how?”
“Jailed for lewd vagrancy, peddling his goodies, you know,” said Smythe, his voice lowered to a theatrical whisper.
Stephen wanted, for some reason, to extract more information on the boy’s delinquencies but he refrained from pursuing the subject with Smythe because he found himself wondering, as he had sometimes wondered before, if Smythe’s freedom of speech and behavior with him were not a kind of espionage. It was altogether possible that Eggleston and Larrabee were using Smythe’s closer familiarity with Stephen to delve a bit more into his, Stephen’s private life. It was more than altogether possible that this was the case. Stephen remembered a little closed counsel among the partners a few months ago when they had discussed the advisability of discharging a junior accountant on suspicion of homosexual inclinations, a suspicion based on nothing more than the facts that he was still unmarried at thirty-one and was sharing an apartment with a younger man whose photograph had appeared in a magazine advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes.
Stephen had felt himself flushing but had said nothing at this counsel. Smythe had spoken up loudly, saying: “I don’t see how it can affect the prestige of the firm one way or another.”
Stephen’s head lifted involuntarily, it sort of jerked up, and he had seen Smythe’s eyes fastened on his flushed face.
“What do you say, Steve?” Smythe had asked him, challengingly.
Despising himself a bit, Stephen had cleared his throat and said, “Well, I don’t think it’s to our advantage to be associated in any way with this sort of deviation from the norm. I mean we don’t want to be associated vynth it even by—”
For a moment he had dried up: then he had completed the sentence too loudly with the word “association!”
“Exactly,” Larrabee had said.
The junior accountant had been given two week’s notice that day.
Now the Italian masseur had turned Stephen on his belly and was kneading his buttocks.
Smythe was continuing his discussion of Nat Webster’s wife’s kid brother’s precociously colorful past.
“In Arkansas he was involved in the beating up of an old homo who is still in traction in a Hot Springs hospital. Well, the old hound dog told this kid to hit the streets and I understand he is now living at the ‘Y’. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Does it mean something besides living at the ‘Y’?” Stephen enquired with affected indifference.
At this moment the masseur’s fingers entered Stephen’s natal cleave, and Stephen said, “Is there any truth in the report that there is going to be a merger between Fuller, Cohen, Stern and the Morris Brothers?”
“Steve, are you in dreamland? Why, the Morris Brothers declared bankruptcy last week, and have flown to Hong Kong!”
“A massage makes me sleepy,” said Stephen affecting a great yawn.
One evening in early spring Stephen was viewing an old Johnny Weissmuller film on his bedroom TV set when the persistent ringing of the phone brought him out of a state that verged upon entrancement.
“Aw, let it go,” was his first impulse but the phone would not shut up. At length he got up from his vibra-chair, turning the TV set so that he could still admire it while at the phone.
“Yes, yes, what is it?” he shouted with irrepressible annoyance.
“Oh, I’m sorry! Did I interrupt something?”
The precocious little girl voice, reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe’s, was recognizable to Stephen instantly. It was Nat Webster’s adolescent wife’s.
“No, no, not a bit, Maude, not a bit in this world or the next one. In fact I was just about to phone you and Nat and invite you over for Sunday brunch to meet my mother who is flying up from Palm Beach for my birthday.”
“You are havin’ a birth-day?” Maude exclaimed as if amazed that he had ever been born.
“How is Nat doing, Maude?”
“Let’s not discuss the condition of Nat,” Maude said with abrupt firmness.
“Bad as that?”
“It’s his lack of concern for the—sorry, I shouldn’t be botherin’ you about this, but, you know, Steve, you’re the only one in the bunch, I mean his Wall Street buddies, that I feel I can open up with. Now, Steve, maybe you’ve heard about my little brother payin’ us a visit from Arkansas.”
“It seems to me that Jerry mentioned you had him with you right now.”
“Look, Steve, I’m callin’ from a coin-box because I didn’t want Nat to hear this conversation. You see, a problem has come up.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, you see, I think that Nat resents my attachment to this sweet kid brother of mine.”
“Oh?”
“Well, I’m not going to drag out the conversation, another party is waitin’ outside the booth. But the problem is this. Nat suddenly told me an’ Clove, that’s my kid brother’s name, sweetest, cutest little sixteenyear-old thing, that there wasn’t room enough for him in our eight-room penthouse on Park.”
“Oh. A spatial problem.”
“Space is not the problem, the problem is that Nat is resentful of youth and natural gay spirits, and that’s the reason he handed Clove ten dollars, imagine, one measly ole sawbuck over the breakfast table this week and told him to go and check in at the ‘Y’.”
Stephen felt a premonitory tightening in his throat. In a guarded tone he remarked that there were a lot of physical advantages to be had at the “Y”, the swimming pool and the workout rooms and association with other young Christian kids.
“Steven, you’re playin’ dumb!” Maude almost shrieked, “Why, everyone knows that ‘Y’s’ are overrun with wolves out for chickens!”
“Wolves? Chickens?”
Stephen gave a totally false little chuckle of incomprehension.
“Quit that, Steve, you can’t play dumb with me! Now I am comin’ straight to the point. I’ve got to remove little Clove from that kind of temptation that’s so unattractive and it occurred to me that you might be able to give Clove a bed at your place, you being the only young bachelor in Nat’s crowd, I thought that maybe—well, how about it, Steve?”
Stephen took a break on that one, a pause for breath.
“I’ve got an extra bedroom for Mother’s visits, but—”
“Oh, that I didn’t know, but if I remember correctly, you’ve also got a sofa in the livin’ room, haven’t you, Steve?”
Stephen again was unable to come up with an immediate, natural reply, but that was not necessary.
“Goddamn, hold your hawses!” Maude shouted presumably to the party waiting outside the coin-box. She then lowered her voice a little and said in her reminiscent-of-Monroe tone, “Well see you Sunday at brunch to meet your mother, she will just love Clove and so will you!”
The phone had been hung up. In a dazed fashion Stephen noted that the nearly nude backside of Johnny Sheffield, son of Tarzan and Jane whom they called Boy, was as close to perfection as, well, his own, when he looked at himself in the triplicate mirror in hi
s dressing room, in the right sort of light.
“My God, why is it that—! I do get myself in for—!”
He was still awake when the midnight news came on. There was a photo of Anita Bryant with a banana cream pie on her face.
“—thrown by a militant gay with a shout about bigots deserving no less…”
“But what will Mom think?” Stephen murmured aloud as he switched off the TV and the bed-lamp and cradled his crotch with a hand…
Mom’s plane was due to be delayed five hours owing to a visibility problem over Kennedy Airport.
Having received this report at Kennedy, Stephen thought about Mom and what her reaction to the situation might be.
“Mom is an old trouper,” he thought, “but definitely not one that’s about to wait five hours in West Palm Beach for weather to change over Kennedy. I bet if I got on the phone and called her suite at the Royal Shores I’d find she is already back there, yes, I ought to do that.”
But he didn’t do that right away. Without a conscious thought of so doing, he took out the latest report on Mom’s stockholdings on Wall Street.
“This will put her in a bad humor,” he thought. “She claims she doesn’t keep up with things like stock fluctuations although I know she watches them like a hawk. She won’t admit that she knows the Dow Jones has slipped almost forty points in the last two months. But it’s just on paper. I’ll tell her again ‘Just trust me. Mom, you know it is just on paper, your net worth is still a million over what it was when Dad left us.’”
He would give her this pitch on the ride back from J.F.K. and she would maintain a reproachful silence for the next several minutes. Then she would make some politely withering remark, something like: “Son, you must know that nobody’s net worth is what it is on paper, not since they forced Richard Nixon to resign and put that peanut-vendor in the White House.”
“All right, I couldn’t agree with you more, but you must remember. Mom, that even with an economic situation unfavorable as it is, you have not only a portfolio of stockholdings worth more than three million but nearly as much in the Manhattan Chemical Bank, I mean in your savings account alone, and as for your holdings in Switzerland, Mom-”