“The thing about the South,” she said, getting up with the sudden perfect idea that she have a drink — a very sweet Manhattan struck her in the cortex, and she got Jimmy Teeth the lemonade the law had earlier cost him—“the thing about the South is that it’s a vale of tears that were shed a long time ago. Its a vale of dry tears.” She looked at Jimmy Teeth.
“Yes’m,” he said. “Good ade.” He thought that this woman was likely too square for him. She had probably not gotten any further in the video age than, say, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, if that. She had on some kind of sweater without buttons.
“Do you understand?” she was saying. “A vale of dry tears stands in relation to true weeping as dry cleaning stands to true washing and cleaning.”
“Yes’m, I got that.”
They sipped their drinks, and Jimmy Teeth feared that the thing had gone this far and yet might not work — how could it do that? Where would he begin anew, with whom? Talk about a vale of dry tears — when Mrs. Hollingsworth again extended her hand to him, only this time it was flat on the table, palm up. The only thing he could figure to do was cover it with his, noting his dirty fingernails and thinking his mother was right in her constant failing fingernail vigilance. Mrs. Hollingsworth covered his hand with her other one and pressed their hands together and Jimmy Teeth felt something he had not yet felt in all the considerable feeling of himself he had done to date. He felt a surge of something like liquid that came up warmly into his shoulders and head and almost made him cry.
Mrs. Hollingsworth looked down at the table between her arms, and Jimmy Teeth thought she was going to cry. But she did not. He sat there for what seemed a very long time, knowing he could not move his hand but not knowing what else he could or couldn’t do. He thought for the first time, What if someone comes in? He didn’t have a lawn mower and his suit was in the garbage. Explain that. Jimmy Teeth could explain a few things, but he couldn’t explain that. Mrs. Hollingsworth was, like, praying still, and he had time to think how he might try to explain his presence. My lawn mower’s impounded and my suit’s compacted. It was funny if you said it like that, and he laughed. The laugh was like the other inappropriate moments they had already shared: it wasn’t inappropriate. They had a little territory here that was, apparently, unique: nothing was inappropriate. Jimmy Teeth saw that. Mrs. Hollingsworth saw that, too, though in an ironic light.
She was not praying. She was thinking. She was thinking that in this bog of impropriety she was preparing to take Jimmy Teeth and herself into there was only one truly immoral mire, and that was to act older than he was. She could be older, she could be more experienced, she could take him in ten minutes where he’d take ten years to get on the streets of sex, and that would be that, but if she pulled rank, if she mothered him or protected him or even counseled him, she would be as wrong as the book on this sort of thing said she was. Jimmy Teeth’s presumed maturity, the young manliness that dared him into her life with his speaking pumpkin head on a fence and his trembling string-sized legs pushing stolen internal combustion all over her expensively landscaped, highly mortgaged family estate, would be the terra firma for their slouching into a swamp as potentially messy as this one.
“Jimmy,” she said, looking him in the eye and despite herself feeling a tenderness for another human being she had not felt in a long time, “Jimmy, I’m going to show you something.”
“Yes!” Jimmy Teeth said, making them both laugh.
“Jimmy, first, if I raise you from five dollars to, say, eight, for the lawn, you won’t tell Mr. Hollingsworth, will you?”
“That would be a private matter between you and me,” Jimmy Teeth said.
“And, Jimmy?”
“Yes’m?”
“Do you go trick or treating?”
“No’m, I quit that.”
That was the right answer. Mrs. Hollingsworth made herself another drink. Jimmy was free to pour himself another lemonade if he wanted one. From there on, Jimmy Teeth was on his own. Mrs. Hollingsworth was not on her own, but to the extent she became Janice Halsey again, which was a journey that partook of Orpheus’ ascent from the underworld with instructions to not look back, with some comical but not ungratifying sex mixed in, she was on her own, too.
Scarliotti and the Sinkhole
IN THE PIC N’ SAVE Green Room, grits were free. Scarliotti, as he liked to call himself, though his real name was Rod, Scarliotti ate free grits in the Green Room. To Rod, grits were virtually sacramental; to Scarliotti they were a joke, and if he could not eat them for free in a crummy joint so down in the world it had to use free grits as a promotional gimmick, he wouldn’t eat them. Scarliotti had learned that when he was Rod, treating grits as good food, he had been a joke, so he became Scarliotti. He wanted his other new name, his new given name, to come from the province of martial arts. Numchuks Scarliotti was strong but a little obvious. He was looking for something more refined, a name that would not start a fight but would prevent one from starting. He also thought a name from the emergency room might do: Triage Scarliotti, maybe. But he had to be careful there. Not many people knew what terms in the emergency room meant. Suture Scarliotti, maybe. Edema Scarliotti. Lavage Scarliotti. No, he liked the martial-arts idea better. With his new name he would be a new man, one who would never eat grits with a straight face again.
There were many things he never intended to do with a straight face again. One of them was ride Tomos, a Yugoslavian moped that would go about twenty miles per hour flat out, and get clipped in the head by a mirror on a truck pulling a horse trailer and wake up with a head wound with horseshit in it in the hospital. Another was to be grateful that at least Tomos had not been hurt. Now, his collection of a quarter million dollars in damages imminent, he didn’t give a shit about a motorized bicycle. He wasn’t riding that and he wasn’t seriously eating grits anymore. He was going to take a cab the rest of his life and eat grits only if they were free. He would never again be on the side of the road and never pay for grits, and it might just be Mister Scarliotti. Deal with that.
The horse Yankees who clipped him were in a world of hurt and he wanted them to be. They were the kind of yahoos who leave Ohio and find a tract of land that was orange groves until 1985 and now is plowed out and called a horse farm and buy it and fence it and call themselves horse breeders. And somehow they breed Arabian horses, and somehow it is Arabs behind it all. Somehow Minute Maid, which is really Coca-Cola, leaves, and Kuwait and Ohio are here. And the Yankees are joking and laughing about grits at first, and then they wise up and try to fit in and start eating them every morning after learning how to cook them, which it takes them about a year to do it. And driving all over the state in diesel doolies with mirrors coming off them about as long as airplane wings, and knocking people who live here in the ditch.
Scarliotti is in his motorized bed in his trailer in Hague, Florida. It is only ten o’clock but the trailer is already ticking in the heat. Scarliotti swears it — the trailer — moves, kind of bends, on its own, when he is lying still in the bed, and not even moving the bed, which has an up for your head and an up for your feet and both together kind of make a sandwich out of you; hard to see the TV that way, which is on an arm just like at the hospital and controlled by a remote just like at the hospital, a remote on a thick white cord, which he doesn’t understand why it isn’t like a remote everybody else has at their house. When the trailer moves, Scarliotti thinks that a sinkhole might be opening up. Before his accident that would have been fine. But not now. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would be left topside if he went down a sinkhole today, and even if he lived down there, which he thought was possible, he knew he couldn’t spend that kind of money down there. He thought about maybe asking Higgins, whom he worked for before the accident, if they could put outriggers or something on the trailer to keep it from going down. They could cable it to the big oak, but the big oak might go itself. He didn’t know. He didn’t know if outriggers would work or not. A trailer wasn’t a canoe, and the dirt was not water.