“What’s that?” she asked. She disentangled from me, then swam to the shallow end and stood up. The water was illuminated and alien there, and a cluster of small, ghost-white objects rested on the bottom of the pool. There were eight or ten of them, bulleted in shape, undulating in the current from our movements.
“They’re flower buds off of that magnolia,” Darla said. “Sepals.”
“No, babe,” I said. “They’re too white.”
She stepped toward the blossoms, her waist rippling the water. She trapped one with her toes, reached under and pulled it up.
“Oh,” she said, holding the object out to me. “It’s a tampon. They’re all just blanched-out, chlorinated tampons.”
I looked around and saw that someone had thrown the sanitary receptacle from the ladies’ room into a boxwood hedge by the lounge chairs. I guess they’d ripped it right off the wall, then dumped it out in the water as a joke.
High schoolers, I thought. Fucking high school vandals fucking up my everything.
THE Starbucks inside the Kroger sells the big paper from Jackson, and people leave sections lying around when heading off to work. Sometimes you pick up a Home and Garden, sometimes the Classifieds, or Religion. Sometimes those of us who don’t head off to work pass the sections around and discuss. (Nobody ever talks about art or creative process, or the city, or the things Darla and I talked about when we lived in the city. No. That life got strangled out when we moved her back home.) All week long the Metro/State section has run installments about the last abortion clinic in the state. A group of lobbyists and politicians are trying to shut it down. From predawn to dusk that clinic is hemmed by evangels wagging posters of dead babies, alongside the Jackson PD and a PBS crew.
On my last day working at the Oriental rug shop over in Oxford, a leisure-class infant puked on the parquet floor. The mother then puppy-talked the baby while gauging a nineteenth century Persian Heriz. “Ow-noh,” she said. “Awuh-woh.” I refused to wipe up and was fired on the spot. Now Darla and I can’t afford to blast the air-conditioning.
THE message Darla’s boss left yesterday was no longer creepy genteel. It was not Wednesday’s, Just checkin’ in on Darla to make sure she’s feelin’ okay. Nor was it Thursday’s, Hey there, just sort of wantin’ to know, well, where Darla might be. Give a call. No. It was: Darla, this is Jane Fisher. Call me the instant you get this.
I rescued my first turtle a couple of months ago, right after I lost the rug store job. This was on a Saturday, and I remember the radio saying the temperature had hit ninety-four degrees by ten-fifteen a.m. — a record. I was coming back from dropping Darla off at Lu’s, where they were going to have a Girl’s Day Out in the country and drink Keystone Lite in Lu’s aboveground pool. The open car windows baptized me in hot air as I gunned it over the straights of County Road 313. The old Mazda shuddered with every brake at the curves. I flew past mobile homes and wood-rot barns and dead cars in yards, and millions of tiny green cotton shanks in rows in the endless fields. Lu is a Gold Star, a wild-ass former professor whose Army reservist husband got KIA while deployed, not shot or bombed, but blown full of metal split rim and rubber after he forgot to cage a transport truck tire, then overinflated it. She retired on the Servicemembers’ Group Life payout, and moved into a shotgun house in the sticks so she could rag economic segregation from beyond the academy. And make bonfires and drink beer.
Squares is what you call as-yet-fruitless cotton plants, Lu taught me. She likes Darla and me because we came to Mississippi from the city. Or, rather, Lu likes that Darla slung back home having put boots on the ground of the Great Cultural Beyond. (“You got more cred,” Lu says, “than any dipshit Cultural Beyonder who judges the South from afar.”) Lu gets drunk and weepy and calls her late husband Rubberneck, and tries to laugh, and wipes her eyes while she lights organic cigarettes. She claims to be pissed that he didn’t leave her a decent combat story, a real whopper to throw around so folks could at least be impressed.
Anyway: It was a box turtle. I pulled over, and walked back to get it off the road. When I got close I realized its back end had been crimped by a tire. It hissed when I picked it up, and a chip of carapace plinked onto the asphalt. Its front legs clawed the air and its back legs flung on limp muscle. I paced around saying Jesus Christ a bunch of times while gingerly suspending the animal; there was tall dead grass on the edges of the fields and rusted wire fence, no water. A couple of old black men drove by in a green, early-seventies F-100, towing shoddy yard equipment on a deck trailer. They looked at me like I was wild. I was desperate to find some moisture in which to place the thing. “Please stop trying to kick your back legs,” I begged. The shell was revealing itself to be a series of fractures. I figured the turtle would die but there was no way I could kill it. Finding no water, I carried it to a shady spot beneath a cluster of shortleaf pines. Huge black ants scurried atop the fallen needles beneath the trees.
“Sorry, man,” I said, putting the turtle on the ground before walking away. “I promise I’m trying.”
That night, while I was cleaning Darla’s puke splats off the bottom of the boys’ rim of the toilet, she got dropped off, drunk. She traipsed in and stood over me, and giggled at my yellow latex gloves.
“You never see these splats because of the way you piss,” I said. “But they’re here nonetheless.” I then told her to hand me the Ajax.
TODAY, we were hauling ass on 278 East, west of Batesville, when I saw it. It was the biggest turtle I’d ever come across; a virtual extinction-in-waiting. Darla yelled when I whipped off the highway and into the manicured, pea-pebble drive of a restored plantation house. She couldn’t believe I was stopping, as if things weren’t bad enough.
We were supposed to be at the Sunflower Festival in Clarksdale, eating mounds of spicy crawdads with corn and sausage, sitting on the lawn near the main stage, listening to sacred steel music and drinking American beer. But halfway there we got in a fight so deep that both of us decided it best to turn the car around, drive right back out of the Delta, and drive beyond the hills, maybe all the way to Shiloh, where we’d walk in the knee-high grass of the battlefields and try to finally figure our shit out. Specifically, Darla confessed that she lost her job because she’s been driving down to Jackson to loiter at the gates of the abortion clinic profiled in the news. She said she doesn’t know why, or even what she thinks about it. Only that she’s overwhelmed by the physical inability to pick a side.