Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells
Sidda cried all that fall. I put my underwear on my head and danced around the apartment like a chicken to cheer her up. We stayed up all night and watched old black-and-white movies on TV. We cooked red beans and rice and drank strong coffee in that old light green kitchen. That natural gas heater with the blue flames licking smelled like old Louisiana, and we had a floor lamp with a tasseled shade in the kitchen. All the time it rained, we felt like we were back in 1927.
We have been through some shit, Sidda and me. Back to when we all still lived at Pecan Grove, and Mama and Daddy passed out every single Thanksgiving before dinner was even on the table. All those holiday decanters of Jack Daniels—they’d make trips to the Abracadabra and buy them special, instead of just pulling a fifth out of the case in the storeroom. Lulu and Little Shep would go hide in their rooms, but Sidda and me wanted a real holiday. We’d carve up that turkey by ourselves and eat Mama’s cornbread dressing and sweet potato fluff. Then we’d lay down on the rug in front of the fireplace with the comforter pulled up over us and watch whatever was on TV. Sometimes we’d make up songs about the Pecan Grove Mental Ward and sing them to the tune of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I remember the time Mama got going on the Mimosas and let the damn turkey burn to a crisp. That poor turkey was carbonized. Mama and Daddy were already back in their rooms when it started smoking. We were almost asphyxiated until we opened up all the windows in the den and got out Pap’s old industrial fan from the storeroom. It was freezing in the house, and Sidda and me laid up in the den and sang. It’s a grand legacy. Fourteen fucking carat.
I tell Sidda: You’re the only one I can talk about it with.
She says, I know, Baylor. That’s what scares me.
Sidda spends all her money on therapy. She’s seeing this guy now who costs eighty-five bucks an hour. I tell her she oughta sue the Pecan Grove perpetrators for punitive damages, have them foot the bill.
Man, somebody’s going to get rich off all the shit we took growing up. Sidda just has to keep dwelling on the past. I try to tell her to just fucking forget about it, like I do. She says I dwell on it too, but I just won’t admit it.
Sometimes she’ll call up crying her brains out, and I know immediately that she’s tried to talk to Mama and Daddy. I tell her, Get off it, Sidd! Just leave it alone. They’ll never change. They’re drunks. They’re goners. Don’t talk to them about anything but the weather and what’s on sale at Wayland’s. Don’t ever call them after five o’clock Louisiana time because they’re knee-deep in the swamp of cocktail hour by then. Look, if you need to keep seeing the shrinks, fine, I’ll even send you money. But don’t put yourself on a goddamn spit. Our parents are dead, okay?
My children are my salvation. Jeff and Caitlin are incredible. Having twins is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. When they were born, it was like the fucking Holy Spirit or something coming down on me. It’s the one and only time I have ever felt that alive. I live for that boy and girl. Playing with them is the only time I don’t feel like someone’s trying to screw me up against the wall. I love how their hair smells after it’s washed. I never thought I’d smell something that clean in my whole life. Caitlin kind of looks like Sidd, with that big forehead and huge eyes. I can’t believe how damn much they take in! You have to be careful what you do and say, because the next thing you know they’re trying to imitate it. I walk in from work and they act like it’s Christmas just to see me. And they are funny.
Jeff will go, Da! and it sounds like “Daddy.” But then Caitlin will take it as a command to dance and she’ll start wiggling her little butt and flailing her arms till she loses her balance and falls down. Then they both crack up and I scoop them up in my arms and say, Where did yall come from?
They’re talking in this language all their own now. Jeff will say something totally incomprehensible and it will totally crack Caitlin up. Man, all those kids do is sit around all day while I’m miserable at the office and crack jokes for each other. They’ve got it made. Caitlin even laughs out loud in her sleep. I can hear her from our room. Sometimes I’ll walk in there, that little heart-shaped night-light Sidda sent will be glowing in the dark, and I’ll just stand there and watch Cait while she sleeps. If she starts giggling it’ll get me laughing too. Or sometimes it’ll make me cry. Man, I’d give anything to laugh in my sleep.
I’m going to make a lot of money. I mean a lot. Caitlin and Jeff are going to have everything. I’m going to send them to the best schools, get them out of this hole before they get stuck.
My alleged parents are crazy as ever. I brought the twins over there the other day and Mama and Daddy were already smashed at four-fucking-thirty in the afternoon. I stayed all of five minutes, then put the twins back in their car seats. Daddy was cussing, and Mama kept ranting about how she could have been happy if only she’d been born Jewish! It’s the same old shit. I’m going to make so much money I’ll forget I was ever their child. I won’t need a damn thing from them, ever.
The only thing is, I hate being a goddamn fucking lawyer. The twins are the only ones I sing and dance for anymore. Sometimes when I’m down at the courthouse and the floor has just been waxed and I hear my heels clicking against the tile, I just long to break into a tap dance right on the spot. The kind of shit Mama used to do just to shake people up. I just want to do something silly, you know. But you can’t.
I hate being a lawyer every minute of the goddamn day. I hate being a parasite and I hate never making anything new. I hate this whole business of making money off of people when they’re hurting, when they’re at their worst.
But even though being a lawyer sucks, it sure beats the hell out of farming. I decided when I was twelve years old I couldn’t put up with that kind of life. Sweating out in those dusty fields, getting your hands filthy, getting sunburned so bad it hurts to turn over in bed at night. I used to sit out on that tractor working for Daddy in the summers and think, I will kill myself if I have to do this for the rest of my life.
I’m going to endure this mental anguish till I’m forty-two, and then I’m retiring to write books like Walker Percy. That man is my hero. He started out being a doctor, but he got TB. He laid up and read Camus and Kierkegaard and all those guys and figured out the whole thing was so absurd he had to become a writer. He moved to Covington, Louisiana, and never practiced medicine again. Man, he could take all those words like “honor” and “gentlemen” and show you how fucking empty they are, but how underneath the emptiness there’s something else, something that’s real, not just some dream about the Old South. Something about loving the land and people and being lonely. Something about putting one foot in front of the other, in spite of the fact that the whole thing is probably already doomed from the beginning.
When I’m forty-two, I’m quitting law and I’m going to have a little studio out behind the house. I’m writing a novel called After the Hurricane. I don’t have the plot worked out, but that’s definitely going to be the title.
One time I lost the autographed first edition of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy that Sidda bought for me when we were at LSU. I searched all over and couldn’t find it anywhere. It used to be in my office over by the twins’ pictures. But it was gone. It was lost. I needed that book. I needed to hold that book in my hands. So I called Sidda, and she made me chant the St. Anthony Prayer for Lost Objects with her. I’m sitting there in my law office with the senior partners walking by, and I’m on the WATS line going: St. Anthony, St. Anthony, won’t you please look around? Something has been lost and must be found.
Sidda says that prayer always works for her. Says she started taking it seriously when she lived in Cambridge and had such a bitch of a time finding parking spaces. She said if I kept saying it over and over, the book would turn up.
And it did.
Sometimes I think my sister has magic.
One time Sidda called me from a pay phone in the Actor’s Equity Lounge. I can’t breathe, she said. I need to know whether it happened or whether I’m cra
You think too much about the family, I told her. Do you have to examine every single thing? Some things just happened and that’s it. But in answer to your question: Yes. It happened. You didn’t make it up, it all happened. If it makes you feel any better, you’re not crazy. You’ve got a one-track mind, but you’re not crazy.
That is so pathetic, Sidda says.
It’s what you come from, I tell her.
3.
One morning all the catfish vanish from the City Park Pool. Overnight. It’s like the whole thing never happened, like it had been a catfish dream, from another town in another state. At first a few people try to ask questions. I mean, we’re talking taxpayers’ money, after all. But all the damn mayor’s office will say is: No comment, no comment. Like they think they’re the White House.
Jesus Christ, the reason the fish died is because the dumb-asses didn’t have the pool treated for chlorine residue before they put the fish in there! They poisoned the fish that were supposed to save their town. Hell, Chaney’s the one who pointed it out to me. Said, Bottom-fish don’t like chemicals, no.
So folks just drop the whole thing. They walk around like it’s their own fault the damn fish died. When you drive by the grain co-op you can see four or five pickups with their bumpers almost scraped clean of the “Thornton: The Catfish Miracle” stickers. But nobody says a word. It’s just like everything else in this place: Something bad happens, you better shut up and feel guilty.
Then the mayor ups and goes nuts. Everybody still calls him “Catfish,” but they say it like it’s a pocketknife they can nick out little pieces of him with. He starts commandeering patrol cars for his own personal use. Just jumps behind the wheel and screeches off with the lights flashing and siren screaming.
Over at the Walk-on-In Cafe, he arrests a woman on her way to a bridal shower because he claims her pantsuit’s illegal. Melvin Jeansonne, the chief of police, tries to reason with him.
But Catfish says, Mel, listen here, buddy. I got me this ring, see, and it gives me special powers. It tells me just exactly how to clean up this town.
Old Melvin looks down at Wascomb Belvedere’s ring and all he sees is a Thornton High School class ring from 1942.
I hear about this at the Theodore Hotel when I have lunch. I’ve got people all over town reporting these things to me because they know I’m interested. Well, more than interested. I guess obsessed is the word. I laugh about it every day, but sometimes I wonder if the man has something growing on his brain or something.
All Mama and Daddy say is, Oh don’t pay any attention to Wascomb. He’s been crazy since high school.
Anyway, this is what does Catfish in. I hear it at Sammy D’Stefano’s downtown grocery, where we get that good Italian fennel sausage. (Around Thornton, Sammy’s grocery is called “Little City Hall,” because so much gossip circulates there.) It seems the illustrious mayor drives out to The Bayou Room, that old cinder-block dive on Highway 17 where they have striptease shows. Goes in there and coerces two of the dancers into his squad car. Then he makes them speak into his “microphone,” which is actually the car cigarette lighter. He makes them state their names, addresses, make and model of their cars, and also their shoe sizes. Then he tells them to shut up and listen to WCCR, The Christian Radio Voice of Central Louisiana.
During a commercial break for glow-in-the-dark Bibles, Catfish explains how he gets coded messages over the radio that help him “purify” the town of Thornton. When he finally lets the ladies out of the car, they complain, but decide not to press any charges. They tell everybody that the worst part was having to listen to all that radio preaching.
The City Council gets all mortified and they give Catfish a big reprimand, but he tells them to go mind their own business. But the Thornton Daily Monitor gets in on the act and plasters all kinds of pictures of Catfish on the front page. Now Thornton is the laughingstock of the state, if it wasn’t already before.
When I tell Sidda about it, she says, Baylor, you are drowning in this gossip. The poor man sounds like he’s mentally ill. And when I tell her, Well maybe he oughta see your shrink, she bites my head off. Tells me not to dare turn her attempts to recover from our family into one of my cynical jokes. She tells me at least she is trying to come to grips with our childhood.
I say, What happened to your sense of humor? You used to have a great sense of humor. Excuse me for living, like Mama used to say.
Shit, Mama needed to be excused for living. One time she tried to slap me because I called her a Nazi, but I ducked so fast that her hand hit the doorframe and she broke her damn wrist. It’s so lovely to consider what she would’ve done to my jaw. The woman’s wrist had to be in a cast for six solid weeks. It was great, I loved it. Sidda was cool, the way she came home from college and autographed it with this tiny swastika hidden in the date.
Sometimes when I’m supposed to be working on a brief, I’ll stare at pictures of Wascomb Belvedere in the paper, and before I know it a whole hour has gone by. I’m bad as Sidda, dwelling on things, just dwelling on them. If I’m not thinking about Catfish, I’m thinking about my children. All day long.
4.
Well, Catfish finally gets nabbed. He’s laying rubber on Cypress Street in the middle of the night and a young cop stops him. Makes him get out of the car and try to walk a straight line, which the mayor fails to do in a big way. The officer cites him for DWI, and then calls his wife Hazelinda to get out of bed and come get him.
When Hazelinda arrives on the scene with her all-weather coat flung over her nightgown she says, Wassy Belvedere, you have pushed this thing too far, you have just gone too far this time.
The next day Catfish schedules a press conference. He up and gets K-Dixie-BS television up to his office and then proceeds to claim he wasn’t drunk, but simply could not walk straight due to a bunion on his foot. Then he actually takes off his boot and sock and sticks his big ugly foot right up in front of the camera.
I think it was the sight of that bunion that made me feel like deep-sixing. I take off early from the office, get me a oyster po’boy and a Dr. Pepper and drive out to the Walker graveyard out near Lecompte. Pap is buried there. Also Sidda’s twin. I sit in the car and eat my sandwich and think about living and dying and going crazy.
I decide to reach down and call Sidda on the car phone.
She says, Bay, it’s nothing short of psychic that you called at this very moment! I was just going to call you with my good news! I got a job directing a very important contemporary Czechoslovakian play!
Great, I tell her. I didn’t know you spoke any Eastern European languages.
She says, It’s a translation, stupid.
Does it pay? I ask.
No, she says, but it’s in Manhattan.
Terrific, Sidda, really. Listen now, don’t forget your little brother when you’re famous. I’ll hang around the stage door in a old worn-out seersucker suit and hit up on the producers to let me sing some of my impromptu blues.
So how are you, Bay? I mean, really.
Well, to tell you the truth, Sidda, I’m parked on the edge of the graveyard. Sometimes this town wears me out. The other evening after work I drove down the bayou road out where Pap and Daddy used to farm near the Dutchmen. Do you know where I mean? To where those live oaks cover the road like a cathedral? And I had to pull the car over for a minute because my chest was pounding so hard. Something just came over me. At first I thought it was a heart attack, but then it passed.
I sat there on the side of the road and stared into those old trees and I thought to myself, These are the same trees I stared at when I was four years old.
I tell my big sister, I am entombed here. I will not get out of t
5.
Mayors disappear around here faster than catfish. Somebody somewhere removes Catfish from office—and before we know it, Crowell Jeffers is the new mayor. Ex-state senator with blond hair. His family owns that restored plantation home just outside of town on the way to the old cotton gin. He went to Princeton, has perfect fingernails and no accent. The kind of guy Daddy always mispronounces words around.
It’s not in the Monitor, but Johnny Rizzo who has the newspaper stand on River Street told me that Hazelinda took Catfish up to Shreveport for some mental help. I’ve got to hand it to the lady, she manages to hold this press conference for her husband on TV and it takes me by surprise. She says: My husband and your ex-mayor, Mr. Wascomb Belvedere, is very tired. He will need to rest for a long time because he is mixed up and just worn out.
Jesus, there’s something so damn eloquent about her speech that it depresses the hell out of me. I have to leave the office before lunch. Drive on out to Pecan Grove to take a look at Daddy’s rice. Chaney’s out there, and we chew the fat for a while.
Chaney says, How you be doin, Doctor-Lawyer?
For some reason Chaney saw those words on my law school diploma and he always says them like a title—like Bishop or Captain or Judge. Somehow just seeing Chaney, the way he holds that denim cap of his in his hand, makes me feel like things are more solid.
A few weeks later, Catfish sends this letter to Mayor Jeffers’ office. Written on this big sheet of butcher paper, folded up to fit into a regular envelope. Handwriting like a six-year-old’s in different colors and he’s drawn a bunch of fish on it.
The letter says: Dear Thornton I am sorry about the fish forever.
Well, Jeffers and his cronies frame the thing all handsome and hang it in the hall with a brass plaque underneath that says “No Comment” like the clippings from small-town newspapers that The New Yorker magazine likes to make fun of.