Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  “How’d it all go?”

  “Tell you when we get there. I’m not going to say anything important over the telephone. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, sweetness. We all miss you.”

  Oscar went downstairs. “She’s on her way,” he said.

  Elinor immediately telephoned both Queenie and Sister; the information was a great relief to everyone.

  . . .

  Billy Bronze, on the drive home, thought about how successful the trip had been. While he had gladly agreed to accompany Miriam, he had been certain that she had been going about the matter in an entirely incorrect manner. One did not simply show up at the corporate headquarters of an oil company with surveyors’ maps and geologists’ reports. Somehow—and Billy wasn’t quite sure how—the oil companies discovered potential oil-bearing property, and came to you. When Billy ventured, on the way to Houston, to tell this to Miriam, she replied, “Of course that’s how it’s done, normally. I know that. But I’m doing it differently.”

  They had stopped for a day in New Orleans. They had eaten lunch in a fine restaurant owned by the father of one of Miriam’s former roommates at Sacred Heart, and after the meal Miriam had gone to the most expensive dress shop in town and bought eight hundred dollars’ worth of new clothes. Billy sat in the shop in amazement as Miriam tried and bought one outfit after another. Miriam purchased clothes with all the excitement with which a vegetarian mother purchases red meat for her carnivorous family, and Billy couldn’t understand why she did it. When they reached Houston, he learned.

  They had been unceremoniously directed to the offices of an assistant manager for development for one of the major oil companies. Despite the obvious brush-off from the main office, Miriam waltzed in with her maps and her surveys and her reports under her arm. Her hair had been done at the hotel that morning, she was lushly perfumed, and she wore the first of her new outfits. She smiled as Billy had never seen her smile before. To the assistant manager she self-deprecatingly laughed at her inability to interpret any of this business for herself, and could he please help her? She introduced Billy as her brother-in-law who didn’t know any more about it all than she did; he was just along to protect her in the big city.

  Knowing Miriam, Billy was shocked that the man did not immediately see through her guile, but he did not. He was charmed, and saw before him only a soft, pretty young woman, helplessly ignorant of business and the proper way of doing things. Billy sat uncomfortably through this imposture. The assistant manager looked through the documents cursorily at first, then with increasing interest. He asked a few questions about the property south of Gavin Pond Farm, and five times he had to be told that yes, it was in Florida. He took up the report and the maps and said, “I’ll be back in just a few minutes.” He was back in twenty. Not once in that absence, even with Billy and Miriam alone in the office, did Miriam drop her role, or speak one word out of her assumed character.

  The assistant manager returned with a superior—two steps above, Billy conjectured. The superior smiled at Miriam, who beamed back and said, “Pleased to meet you. Will you please tell me the truth? Have Mr. Bronze and I been making fools of ourselves, coming here like this?”

  The superior assured Miriam that they had not made fools of themselves, and that he would have been pleased to see them even if they had not brought such interesting papers along with them. The man wanted to know if they could possibly leave the maps and the reports with him for a few days. Miriam, who had carefully seen to the preparation of ten sets of the documents, hesitated, and then replied, “Well, if y’all promise me y’all will be real careful with them, and not get them mixed up with anybody else’s.”

  The man promised.

  Miriam gave him a calling card with her office telephone number written on it in a feminine script in violet ink on the reverse. “Billy,” she said, “you give him one of yours, too.”

  Billy did so, but scarcely trusted himself to speak for fear he would laugh.

  “We just had them made up last week,” said Miriam engagingly. “Aren’t they adorable! Mama told me nobody would take us seriously unless we had calling cards.”

  The man promised to telephone soon. After shaking Miriam’s limp hand and Billy’s sweating one, he hurried off with the maps and reports clutched tightly in his hand.

  Billy did not realize until they had left the office that his shirt was wet through with perspiration.

  “Hell,” he whispered to Miriam as they were going past the secretary’s desk.

  “Shhh!” whispered Miriam, and to the secretary, said, “Bye-bye, honey.”

  In the hallway, elevator, and lobby Miriam maintained her assumed identity, but once out on the street, crowded with businessmen and secretaries on their way to lunch, exploded, “Oh, Lord, Billy, get me back to the hotel and out of this damned dress.”

  . . .

  The oil company visits were accomplished with a precision and similarity that astonished Billy. Every morning Miriam wore a different outfit. Every morning they were admitted to the office of a man on the low end of the corporate echelon dealing with development. Every morning they were subsequently introduced to his superior, and after every meeting Miriam rushed back to the hotel to change out of those chafing, feminine clothes, and into pants, or even overalls. The afternoons were rough going for both Miriam and Billy in Houston—and later in Dallas and Tulsa—for there was nothing for them to do, and both were used to hard work. At first they had maintained separate rooms, but after the first night they had decided to share a room. It wasn’t that they needed to save money, but they hated waste.

  The question of seduction had been set aside by Miriam’s matter-of-factness when she said after the first night in Houston: “You see what they’re charging us for these rooms, Billy? And my room’s got two beds. You come on in here tonight, and let that other room go. No sense in our taking fifteen dollars out of our pockets to put in theirs.” That night, on the telephone to her father, Miriam said, “If Frances needs to speak to Billy, tell her that he’s staying here in my room. This hotel charges fifteen dollars a night, and we decided we were damned if we were paying for two rooms.”

  “Miriam,” said her father, “do you know that Billy snores?”

  Billy was embarrassed at first that Miriam dressed and undressed right in front of him, until he realized that she never bothered to draw the shades either. She wasn’t trying to seduce him or excite voyeurs in the neighboring buildings, she was simply unselfconscious and naturally immodest.

  As he lay in bed that night, with Miriam asleep and snoring herself in the other bed, Billy wondered why he had chosen Frances rather than Miriam. It was an acknowledged fact in the family and in Perdido that Miriam was prettier. She was capable and smart, and Billy enjoyed her company. But she was like a sister to him, and Frances was definitely a wife. It was, he decided before he drifted off, another of those mysteries of the Caskey women.

  In only one company out of the eight they visited were Miriam and Billy received with anything less than courtesy and interest. She let each of them know that she and Billy could be reached in about ten days or so in Perdido, but that they would be doing a little traveling until then.

  “Let them stew,” said Miriam.

  At the end of their mission, she and Billy drove from Tulsa to Little Rock on the first day. On the second day, starting very early, they made it to Jackson, Mississippi, before stopping at noon for something to eat. They turned in at a dilapidated barbecue restaurant with fragrant smoke coming out of a wide chimney. Both ordered pork ribs, French-fried onions, and a beer.

  After their meal they walked to the cash register and Billy paid their check. While he was waiting for his change, he was astonished to hear Miriam addressing the cook at the stove.

  “What the hell are you doing back there?” she demanded in a sour voice.

  Billy looked up. At the grill in back was a man about thirty, handsome in his way, but greasy and splattered with barbecue sauce, wea
ring a filthy apron and a dingy white shirt beneath that.

  He had turned to Miriam with surprise and begun to reply automatically, “Hey, ma’am, I’m—” when he broke off, and exclaimed, “Miriam!”

  “Get out from behind there,” commanded Miriam. “This minute.”

  “Miriam,” Billy said in a low voice, “who—”

  “Now just a second,” said the manager at the cash register, holding up a coarse fleshy hand.

  The cook put down his spatula and came forward.

  “Miriam?” he said again.

  “Do you know who this is?” said Miriam angrily to Billy, paying no attention to the manager.

  “Lord, no!” exclaimed Billy. “I have no idea in the world, Miriam.”

  “This is Malcolm. Malcolm Strickland, Queenie’s son. Lucille’s brother. Malcolm Strickland, what the hell do you think you’re doing back there?”

  “He’s cooking for me!” said the manager indignantly, stretching out his hand to push Malcolm back toward the stove. “And there are people waiting, Strickland.”

  “Queenie thinks you are dead!” cried Miriam.

  “She don’t!”

  “She does, ’cause you haven’t written her in I-don’t-know-how-many years. She thinks you probably got yourself killed in the Pacific somewhere. She looks at that picture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, and she says, ‘I wonder if one of those poor boys is Malcolm.’ Why the hell haven’t you picked up the telephone and called her?”

  Malcolm didn’t answer, but he began to retreat toward the stove.

  “Danjo joined the army,” said Miriam, raising her voice. “He married a German girl called Fred and now they’re living in a castle on the top of some damn mountain. Queenie is spending all her time nursing Sister. Sister fell down the stairs when Early Haskew came after her, and hasn’t got out of the bed since that day.” Miriam’s voice continued to rise in a crescendo. “Lucille has a baby boy called Tommy Lee, and she and Tommy Lee are living with Grace out on a farm south of Babylon, and there’s millions and millions of barrels of oil under a swamp out there.”

  “Oil?” echoed Malcolm weakly, astounded by this unexpected flood of revelations in his family. He had imagined that in his absence, everything had remained the same.

  “Malcolm Strickland,” said Miriam, her voice now low and threatening, “get out from behind this counter, right now.”

  All the customers in the restaurant—some thirty or more—had stopped all pretense of eating and were following the little drama at the counter.

  “Strickland,” said the owner of the restaurant, “you get back to that stove. Ma’am,” he said in exasperation to Miriam, “why the hell don’t you just take off?”

  Miriam flipped up the board that allowed entrance behind the counter, marched past the astounded manager, grabbed Malcolm’s greasy arm, and pulled him out past the register.

  “Get the car started,” she said to Billy.

  Billy, his change still on the counter, hurried out of the building. Miriam, with Malcolm in tow, headed after him.

  “Leave the apron!” the restaurant owner shouted.

  “Stand still,” Miriam ordered Malcolm, then she spun him around. Undoing and then removing the apron, she flung it over the back of a chair and pulled Malcolm out the door.

  “Get in the back seat,” she commanded once they’d got outside.

  “Miriam, where on earth—” Malcolm began.

  “I am taking you back to Perdido, where you belong.”

  “Lord, Miriam, I cain’t—”

  He was already in the back seat.

  “Are you married or something?” Miriam asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Have you bought a house?”

  He shook his head again. “I got my clothes though,” he ventured softly.

  “Queenie’ll buy you new ones,” said Miriam. “Billy, let’s go.”

  The owner of the restaurant stood in the front entrance of the restaurant, shouting that Malcolm was fired and would never find work in Hinds County again.

  Miriam turned around in the seat. “James is dead—died a year ago—and left Queenie money.”

  Malcolm stared out the window, as if riding in an automobile were a thing completely new to him.

  “Your old friend Travis Gann is gone, too. You know what he did? He went and raped your sister, that’s what he did, and she got pregnant. But that’s a secret, so not a single word, you hear, Malcolm?”

  Malcolm nodded his head.

  . . .

  And so the journey back to Perdido continued with Malcolm in the back seat. He could hardly overcome his bewilderment at being summarily kidnapped from his job and his life of three years past. While Billy drove steadily southeast through the corn and cotton fields of Mississippi, Miriam would occasionally turn around to throw some piece of family or town news at Malcolm or to berate him for his treatment of Queenie.

  It was dark by the time they crossed the Alabama line, and Miriam had dozed off. “Alabama,” Billy said, and Miriam shook herself awake. “We’ll be in Perdido in about an hour.”

  Malcolm said, “Miriam, you think Ma’s gone want to see me?”

  “Of course, she is,” snapped Miriam. “But she’s gone be mad to find out you’re still alive.”

  “I treated her bad,” said Malcolm.

  “You sure did. Are you gone sponge off her for the rest of your life now?”

  “Hey, I been working three years. I was in the army for six. I ain’t been sponging off nobody.”

  “You’re no-good, Malcolm,” said Miriam. “And you’re never going to amount to anything. I don’t know why I bothered to pull you out from behind that counter.”

  “Neither do I,” sighed Malcolm from the darkness of the back seat.

  . . .

  The Caskeys were still at the table at Elinor’s when Billy, Miriam, and Malcolm pulled up before the house that night.

  “I don’t want to go in,” said Malcolm.

  “I wouldn’t either if I smelled like you,” said Miriam, getting out of the car. “Wait five minutes, Malcolm, and then come on inside. There’s no sense in putting off and putting off.”

  Billy and Miriam staggered wearily into the house. As they stepped into the dining room everyone rose from the table to welcome them. Knowing of their probable return that evening, Lucille and Grace and Tommy Lee had come in from Gavin Pond Farm. The outcome of the trip to Texas would affect them most.

  “This family has been falling apart!” exclaimed Queenie.

  Frances embraced her husband.

  “Did y’all bring us a million dollars in cash?” asked Grace facetiously.

  “No,” returned Miriam. “What we brought back was a plugged nickel.”

  “Oh,” said Queenie, “that’s too bad. We got the impression everything was going along pretty well.”

  “There’s no problem about the oil,” said Miriam airily, “I imagine my phone’ll start ringing tomorrow.”

  “The phone started ringing two days ago,” said Oscar, “but I told them that you were still out of town and there wasn’t anybody else they could talk to.”

  Billy, still holding his wife close, looked over Frances’s shoulder, and said, “Miriam and I have got a surprise out in the car.”

  “Oh,” cried Queenie excitedly. “Y’all brought us presents. I bet it’s moccasins, and Indian stuff. Y’all were in Oklahoma, weren’t you? You know I’ve got a brother in Oklahoma, I haven’t heard from Pony in—”

  Queenie broke off at the sound of the front screen door banging shut.

  “Who is that?” asked Elinor.

  “That,” Miriam replied, “is the surprise.”

  In the doorway stood Malcolm, dingy, rumpled, wan, smelling of rancid grease and barbecue sauce.

  Queenie screamed and collapsed into her chair.

  “Oh, Lord!” cried Lucille, and jumped behind her mother’s chair as if she needed protection.

  “We thought you
were dead,” said Grace in a low voice.

  “Well, he’s not,” said Miriam. “Found him outside of Jackson, looking just about like he does now except he had an apron on then. Malcolm, now that everybody’s seen you, maybe you could do us all a favor and go over to Queenie’s and take a bath.”

  “What’ll I wear when I get out of the tub?” said the bewildered Malcolm, glancing down at his clothes. He looked around the room at his family, and explained, “She wouldn’t stop. I guess she thought I’d run away. I wouldn’t have. I sort of missed Perdido. Miriam said James was dead. That’s too bad.” Then he turned and shuffled out into the darkness of the hallway.

  Queenie screamed again and ran after him. “Malcolm! Malcolm!”

  “He’s all grown up!” marveled Grace to Lucille. “I cain’t hardly believe it.”

  “If y’all had told me,” said unperturbed Zaddie, coming into the dining room from the kitchen, “I would have killed the fatted calf.”

  Chapter 68

  New Year’s

  Though she was bone weary, Miriam was up late the night of her return from Texas. Sister wouldn’t let her go to bed. Sister was angry that Miriam had stayed away so long. Sister was mad that Miriam had telephoned so infrequently. Sister first wanted to hear Miriam tell one story, about her success with the oil companies for instance, but almost as quickly as Miriam had begun it, Sister interrupted with a demand for another tale altogether. “Tell me what you thought when you saw Malcolm standing at that stove in the barbecue restaurant, darling.” Sister’s mind wouldn’t stay fixed. One minute she would be demanding that Miriam walk across the room and hug her, and the next Sister would almost weep for her own unhappiness at being abandoned for such a protracted time.

  “You know what happened to me when you were gone?” Sister said accusingly.

  “What?” said Miriam wearily, sitting in a wicker chair next to the door, as if to make a very quick exit if Sister would ever let her go.

  “You know who walked in this house right through the front screen door and nobody lifted a finger to stop him from doing it?”

  “Who?”