Outlaw Head & Tail

Normally I couldn't have made the tape that Saturday. Right there during the job interview a few weeks before, Frank, my soon-to-be boss, had said, "Rickey, is there anything about this job that you have a problem with?"

I didn't say, "I can't work for a man who ends sentences with prepositions." I couldn't. It was a job bouncing, or at least talking. I was going to be something called a pre-bouncer. If some guy came into the Treehouse and looked like he meant trouble, I was supposed to go up to him and start a little conversation, let him know this wasn't the kind of place to throw a punch without inelegant and indubitable consequences.

I have a way with words. I'm synonymous with rapport.

I said to Frank, "Well, I'd rather not work Saturday days because my wife has to go to temple and I have to drive her over there. I don't go to temple. Hell, I don't even go to church," I said. "I don't mind working Sundays, but I'd really like it if you could get someone to work afternoons on Saturdays for me. Night--Saturday night--I'll be here. The only thing I ask of you is that I don't work Saturday afternoons, say, until six o'clock."

Frank said, "You know, you talked me into it. Man, what a way with words. It's a deal. You're a godsend, Rick. I lucked out getting you as a pre-bouncer."

Frank had opened the Treehouse just outside Darlington, South (continued on page 120) Outlaw (continued from page 69) Carolina a year earlier but didn't hire a bouncer or pre-bouncer right away. About the same time his insurance agent told him his payments would soon double, though, he hired me and a guy named Sparky Voyles to keep things down. During the first year Frank had put in claims for a whole new set of glasses, from shot and snifter to the special two-foot beer glasses he ordered, plus 12 tables, 16 chairs and another tree stump to replace the one that caught on fire, causing smoke damage to the ceiling and 42 stitches to his own head one night after a fearful brawl erupted over whether Chevys or Fords would dominate the circuit in the upcoming season.

Frank bought the Treehouse because of insurance, ironically. He'd worked in the pulpwood trade and a load of logs had slipped off a truck he was standing behind, came rolling right off like a giant wave and clipped him on the knees so hard they said he could run as fast backward as forward for a few days.

Of course, he couldn't run at all and had to get fake knees installed. His lawyer also got him another quarter million dollars or so because of a lifetime's worth of pain and consequent nightmares. Frank took most of that money and made the Treehouse, a regular small warehouse building he furnished with tree trunks from floor to ceiling. If you blindfolded someone and took him inside the bar, then took off the mask and showed him around, he'd have the feeling that the entire building was set above the ground, built into the forest.

During the first year there were fights and insurance claims, but the second year started right with me and Sparky to quiet things down. Frank didn't want us to be too heavy-handed, though. He didn't want the Treehouse to end up so quiet it looked like a flock of mute birds had built their nests there. He asked only for stability.

Sparky had gone the same route as Frank--he worked at the railroad before becoming a bouncer, getting paid under the table because he took in disability checks after his thumbs got cut off between two boxcars that had clanged together. They weren't supposed to collide and he thought he could prevent it from happening. He couldn't. Sparky had been a brakeman originally, out of Lexington.

Anyway, I worked hard pre-bouncing and kept up with what I had to know, which was mainly words. This is how I get back to the tape and that Saturday. What I'm saying is, because I'm so conscientious about my job, it could've killed my marriage.

•

Last Thursday, Jessie went into her doctor's office to finally have him go ahead and do that sonogram thing. She couldn't wait to know what our first baby was going to be, building her argument around the fact that we didn't make all that much money, so if it were a boy we needed to pinch even harder to save up for his circumcision.

Jessie works as a free-lance interior decorator. She got her degree in art history and felt like it gave her the right to design living rooms.

I had to take Jessie to the doctor's office. But she couldn't get an appointment before four o'clock in the afternoon. I got clearance from Frank to get off work on Thursday, but that meant I had to come in Saturday morning at 11, because the guy who normally worked Saturdays needed to go to a wedding. It was a simple and clean swap. There didn't seem to be that much of a problem.

So I took my wife to the doctor and she did what she had to do, but the doctor still couldn't even take a stab at the baby's sex, because the baby kept its back to us the whole time. I was hoping it'd be a girl. I have never seen myself as being the father of a shy son.

•

Two days later I drove Jessie to the synagogue. I drove back home in time to throw in a tape and set the VCR so I wouldn't miss Bonanza, which showed in syndication every Saturday on one of the cable channels. I set the station and time to record, then left for the bar.

I watch Bonanza every week. That's where I get my ways. That's where I get my ability to talk people out of starting fights. One time this burly truck-driver type seemed upset that a white guy came into the Treehouse with an African-American woman. There'd been a similar episode on Bonanza one time when Hoss piped up to a stranger, "Well, would you rather be blind and not have to see the ways of the world?" He said it to a redneck, of course. Words of wisdom, I thought right then and there. I've thought "words of wisdom" on more than one occasion while watching Ben Cart-wright bringing up his boys the best he could. I remember watching Bonanza when I was a boy, too, and how I admired the way Little Joe and Hoss and even Adam handled themselves in town. My father, though, used to throw beer cans at the television set and say, "What them boys need to use a little more often is their trigger fingers, not their tongues."

It's that kind of thinking that makes it almost amazing that I became a pre-bouncer. If I had taken my father seriously back in the Sixties, I'd have ended up being something more secluded and self-centered, like a bookkeeper or a jockey.

I said to the burly guy, "Hey, there's two things that can happen here: Either you can learn to understand that love is blind, or I can get Sparky to come over here with his eight remaining fingers and blind you himself so you don't have to live with seeing interracial dating in your midst. Comprende, amigo?"

I pointed at Sparky. Without his thumbs, it looks like he could use his fists as skewers. The truck driver looked over at Sparky, back to me, then to the white guy and the black woman. He said, "Well, OK then," just like that. I stood my ground and tried not to shake. The little voice in my head kept thanking the Cartwrights over and over.

•

So I put the tape in the VCR, set the station and time and drove off to the Treehouse. The bar doesn't open until noon, but I got there at 11 to help Frank clean up from the night before and set out our specials in the plastic stand-up signs on each table. Frank said, "How goes it, Rickey?"

I said, "Good."

He said, "Uh-huh. You know, we didn't really get to talk yesterday. I mean, I heard you say that you still didn't know if you'll have a little boy or a girl, but what else did the doctor say?"

I wiped off a table. Friday night had been pretty slow at the Treehouse. Down the road there had been a yearly festival with a battle of the bands and a tractor pull. I said, "He didn't say much. He asked if she'd been taking care of herself, whether she'd quit drinking and smoking. She said she had, which is true, and goddamn, it ain't fun around the house, by the way. Then he said he thought her delivery date might need to be changed to (continued on page 154) Outlaw (continued from page 120) about a week earlier. Not much else went on. He dabbed some goo on her big stomach and we saw this little crooked Vienna sausage-looking thing on the TV screen. Then he gave us the tape." Well, no. I said, "The tape!"

I didn't say goodbye to Frank. I didn't tell him I'd be right back. I just left the Treehouse, got into my car and drove 15 minutes back to my house.

It was too late. Right over the image of my as-yet-sexless child, the floating little thumb-sucking thing inside Jessie's body, Hoss now talked to Little Joe about how skittish the horses seemed to be all of a sudden.

•

Sparky said, "Well, it could be worse. At least she still has the baby. One time when I was working Amtrak, this woman came screaming out of the bathroom saying she'd miscarried into the toilet. We were flying down the track at about sixty miles an hour, you know. I was on my break and was eating an egg-salad sandwich in the dining car. I remember all this because I had a mouthful of egg in my mouth when the woman made the announcement."

I nodded my head and shoulders quickly, trying to get Sparky to finish the story. I needed to make some phone calls or talk to some customers.

Sparky said, "She came running out of that bathroom saying she thought the thing came out of her but she wasn't sure. On a train, you know, it goes straight down to the track. At sixty miles an hour you don't exactly have time to check what came out in the bowl underneath you. One time I had a kidney stone and I was supposed to be pissing into a strainer, but I kept forgetting. So I have a stone on the tracks somewhere between Lexington and Danville."

I nodded hard, waved my right hand like a paddle wheel for Sparky to finish up. A group of four women came into the Treehouse, all of them in their 30s. I needed to find a way to talk to them.

"This woman on the train--her name ended up being Brenda--had a nervous breakdown right there and then. She fainted. Two men who were afraid of airplanes and traveled on business trips to New York all the time got up and grabbed her, checked her heartbeat and breathing and put a pillow behind her head. I said, 'Damn, you don't see this every day on Amtrak, do you?' Well, as it ended up, we took her off the train at the next stop and sent her to the local hospital. That would be in Gaffney--we were doing the run down to New Orleans--and then, on our way back up, she waited there at the station for us. She got on board and said, 'I want you to tell me where we were when I miscarried. I want you to take me to the spot so I can give my baby a proper burial.' I told her that by this time--a couple of days had gone by--surely the miscarriage was gone. But she got on board the train and took it to Charlotte, and then we got out and started walking back south on the tracks. My boss said I had to do it and that I'd probably get a raise for the whole thing."

Two more women walked into the bar. I waved my arm faster for Sparky to get to the moral of his story.

"We found about twenty turtle shells," said Sparky. "You wouldn't believe how many turtles get stuck in between the tracks, especially snapping turtles when you're near a lake or in the swamp. We found turtle shells, and that was it. I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be looking for. And if I did run across anything that looked like a baby, I didn't want to see it, or point it out to Brenda. So, as it ended up, after I finally convinced her that we'd gone past the spot where she miscarried, she walked over into the woods and got some sticks. She borrowed my shoelaces and made a small wooden cross, stuck it a few feet from the track and said she felt better. And an hour later this gandy dancer came from the station to pick us up. I wonder whatever happened to old Brenda," Sparky said, like I'd know.

He walked off with his hands straight down in his pockets, like trowels were attached to the ends of his arms.

•

I lost all pride and any bashfulness whatsoever and started asking women if they had any of their sonogram videotapes around their houses. I offered $100 to buy one of them.

Teresa Smiley said she'd be right back. Teresa Smiley said she kept her sonogram on a bookshelf stuck between a 12-step-program book and a Stephen King novel. Since her husband had custody of their little boy, she got depressed thinking about it but said, "A hundred dollars? Hell, I won't sell for less than three hundred."

It was one of those occasions when I didn't have time to check out the going rate for sonograms on the black market. So I said, "One fifty." I said, "Lookit, unless you had your sonogram on Thursday, there's going to be a different date down there on the screen. I mean, I'm going to have to go to great lengths to find a way to forge the video."

Teresa Smiley stared hard at me, then sat back down at her table, a table filled with women who worked third shift at the mill. Teresa said, "The memory of a child is worth more than a hundred and fifty dollars, Rickey. And your wife won't even notice the wrong date down there. We're interested in the baby, not the time of day. I'm insulted and you should be ashamed."

"A minute ago," I said, "you were saying how you got depressed even knowing the tape was around. Come on, Teresa, you don't know how much I need this tape." I told her my story but didn't explain about taping Bonanza over the image of my baby. I told her it was professional wrestling, so she would understand why I might be a little distraught about having to work on Saturday in the first place.

Teresa said, "Two fifty." I said, "Two," and she left to get the tape. I didn't even ask her if her child, too, was turned away from the camera, and if it wasn't turned away, if it was real obvious as to the sex of the child. When I saw ours, I wasn't even sure which was the head and which was the tail. To me, Jessie's sonogram looked like a picture of an ulcer or something on her stomach wall.

Sparky came over to me a few minutes after Teresa left and said, "You might have some trouble coming at you, but I'll be there."

I said, "What do you mean?" The worst thing that could happen, I thought, was that Jessie's service would be canceled and she'd come to the Treehouse to spend the day.

Sparky said, "Well, don't turn around immediately, but there's a guy down at the end of the bar staring a hole through you. It's Teresa's ex."

I didn't turn at all. I could feel the guy staring straight into my brain. The Treehouse had its regulars who came in every day--housepainters, self-employed body-shop men, the disabled, people who really worked only on Wednesday mornings over at the flea market--but there were people who came in haphazardly, maybe once a month, to sit by themselves and get over whatever it was that stuck in their craw. I never had to pre-bounce any of those people. First, it wouldn't matter--if they wanted to fight, they'd fight regardless of what I had to say. Second, most of them were so consumed with whatever bothered them, they didn't have the energy to get off the bar stool and start a fight, though they'd probably like to see one.

I said to Sparky, "The one who got custody?"

He said, "That's the one. Name's Ted, but everybody calls him Slam. He won the state wrist-wrestling championship four years in a row, and the Southeast tournament twice."

I said, "Goddamn it." I thought, If only I'd taken the time to look at the videotape. I thought, If only the baby had turned around so we'd know the sex of it. I thought, If only Jessie hadn't gotten the appointment on Thursday. And almost caught myself thinking, If only I'd put on a rubber that night.

Sparky said, "I arm-wrestled him one time, but it's hard for me to get a grip, what without a thumb. Hell, it was hard for him, too. I kept sliding right through his hand."

"Shut up, Sparky," I said and walked over to Slam. I said, "Your ex-wife's about to save my life, man. I screwed up and taped over the videotape of my child-to-be inside the womb, and Teresa's going to get y'all's so I can make a tape of it." I said, "My name's Rickey."

Slam said, "Wife."

I said, "Excuse me?" He didn't look at me. He seemed to keep staring at where I had stood talking to Sparky.

"Not ex-wife. Wife. Just like a piece of paper can't make a marriage, a piece of paper can't end one neither," said Slam.

I said, "Are you Catholic?"

This is no lie. Slam said, "I'm an American and it's the American way."

I said, "Oh. Well, then your wife is about to save my skin."

Tape the tape, I thought. I thought, I should've asked her to tape the tape. I mean, there wasn't a reason why Teresa shouldn't keep her own tape and there wasn't a reason for me to pay so much to more or less swipe hers. I tried to think of a way of getting to her before she even got back inside the Treehouse, so we could at least renegotiate.

Slam said, "What?" He held his beer in a way I'd not seen before, a half inch from his face and a quarter inch to the right. I thought he was using the can as a mirror to check out anyone who walked up behind him. Being a prebouncer, I notice things like that.

I said, "Your wife's saving my ass."

There's this look that only certain people can give. There's this look some people can give that's somewhere between smoke in their eyes and hand grenades in their pockets. Slam had that look. I turned my head toward Sparky, but he'd already started punching a guy named Cull who came in drunk and wanted a piece of a guy named Tinker for not painting his house evenly.

Slam said, "Well, I guess that's better than humping your ass, Bo." He said, "Glad to hear it," grabbed his beer and left the bar with it, either unaware of the law or unconcerned about the police who regularly parked across the street.

Sparky came over and said, "You got a way with words, Rickey. Whatever it is you said, you did it, man."

I sat down on the bar stool next to Slam's and concentrated so as not to pee in my pants like in the cartoons.

•

As soon as Jessie had taken that oneminute-and-you-know-if-you've-reallymissed-your-period test in the bath room, she pulled a Walkman out of the bedroom closet, put in new batteries and slipped in a tape of Mahler's Fourth Symphony. She pulled the earpieces of the headset as far apart as possible, strapped them around her sides and put the volume on full blast. Jessie said, "Rickey, we're going to have a baby."

I'd been watching her from the other side of the room. I didn't even know about the bathroom test. I had been sitting there on one side of the room reading my thesaurus. "A baby?" I said. "Are you sure?"

She said, "I have this theory. I believe that if you play music inside the womb, the fetus absorbs it, and when the baby comes out, instead of crying and screaming, it'll make noises similar to an orchestra."

I said, "What?"

She said, "The reason a baby always wails is that it absorbs the noises of the outside world for nine months. In the city it hears horns honking, people screaming, the conglomeration of people's conversations all going into one big drone, dogs barking, cats crying out in the night, the hiss of a teapot." She had a list of every possible noise, it seemed. She finally finished her dictum with, "So if I keep playing classical music, when the baby's in pain or wants its bottle, we'll be serenaded with French horns and oboes, the violin. Bassoons." She said, "Bassoons! And piccolos and flutes and cellos."

Hell, to me it didn't sound like all that bad a theory. I mean, it's logically possible. I said, "Why don't you order some of those books on tape, and then at night the baby can tell us stories."

Jessie put another Walkman on her own ears and left the room. She left the room a lot during her pregnancy. I'm not sure why and I've never asked--I've always tried to be sensitive to her needs.

•

Ted, or Slam, whatever, kept standing outside the Treehouse. He was waiting for his ex-wife, Teresa, I knew. Just about the time I started to go outside to tell him I wouldn't make a tape of his preborn child, Teresa tapped me on the shoulder with the videotape. Like every intelligent woman with a lunatic ex-husband in her life, she had sensed danger. She had parked her Buick a few blocks away and come in the back entrance. I said, "Ted's here."

She looked around the place. She said, "Ted was in here earlier, but I don't see him now."

I said, "Out front."

"Oh. Well. Good," she said. "That'll be two hundred dollars, no check."

I only had a check. I said, "Hey, look, I got a better idea. Why don't we find another VCR and do a tape-to-tape so you don't have to lose yours totally? I mean, someday you might want it back." I kind of saw a big confrontation ahead, like when birth mothers arrange for adoptive parents, then change their minds in the delivery room.

Teresa said, "I won't change my mind, believe me. I've had it. I want a new life, bubba. As a matter of fact, I've already contacted the paper to advertise a yard sale for next weekend. I'm getting rid of my old high school yearbooks, too."

I said, "Well, OK." It was nearly three o'clock and I couldn't take the chance of Jessie's getting a ride home from the synagogue with one of her friends, slipping in her tape and fainting when she saw that her baby had suddenly gained a clear and distinct shape that looked like Hoss. I said, "Hold on a second."

I bought Teresa a drink on my monthly tab and walked over to where Sparky stood in the corner of the bar, scanning the slim crowd. "Look, Sparky," I said, "do you have one of those twenty-four-hour bank-teller cards by any chance? I lost mine in the machine--not because I didn't have any money but because the back strip got dirty or something--and it's Saturday and the bank's closed and I need two hundred bucks right now to buy off the tape. I can give you a check today, or if you wait until Monday morning I can go over to the bank and get cash for you."

Sparky said, "I hope you remember this when you go and name your child."

I said, "I can't name my kid Sparky."

Sparky said, "I wouldn't expect you to." He reached into the wallet he kept chained to his belt loop and pulled out 200 one-dollar bills. He said, "My given name's Earl. Earl for a boy, Earline for a girl."

I don't know why I said OK, but I did. I figured if I could get Sparky drunk later on in the evening maybe he'd forget the promise.

"Here you go, "I said to Teresa. She handed me the tape. She handed me her own personal sonogram videotape of the only child she'd ever had and said, "I hope I picked up the right one. Slam and me did some amateur strip stuff one night, but we never sent it off to any of those programs on cable."

I asked Sparky to cover for me, to use the word discretionary or castigatory should a fight seem imminent, and left through the back door.

•

There is a Supreme Being. Someone powerful exists, or at least existed for me that afternoon. I pulled out my tape filled with Bonanza, plus a half-hour special on the Nascar season at the halfway point, and pushed Teresa's baby's video into my machine. It didn't need rewinding. I wondered if she'd ever really watched it.

It wasn't her strip show. Right there on the screen, in brilliant shades of gray, was a form. I couldn't make out eyes or genitals. There was no way possible Jessie could see the difference between her womb and that of a woman who grew up and lived in a mobile home.

I felt good about living in America.

The Supreme Being stayed on my side, because while the tape was playing, in walked Jessie, home from a committee meeting of a group called Sisters of Bashemath, Ishmael's Daughter. She said, "I thought you had to work."

I moved closer to the television screen, down on the carpet, and held my forearm parallel to the date and time logo at the bottom. I said, "I went and got things going, but I started feeling a little nauseated."

Jessie came up to me, all smiles, and put her hand on the back of my neck. She said, "That's so sweet. You're having sympathy pains."

I knelt on the floor in front of the TV screen. I could hear Mahler's First Symphony playing out of the cassette attached to Jessie's stretched sash. I said, "Well, yeah, I had some pains all right, but I'm feeling much better now."

Jessie asked me to rewind the sonogram. I clenched my teeth, rewound it, prayed to all the superior beings ever invented for her not to notice the difference. And she didn't. While we watched Teresa's child float around in her belly, Jessie lowered the volume on her Walkman and pushed her chin in toward her stomach. She said, "We're watching you right now, honey."

I didn't say anything about any kind of name recognition, like, "We're looking at you, Earl or Earline."

I sat and watched. And I thought to myself, Certainly I want my own child to grow up to be happy and famous and healthy and intelligent. I thought, I want to be able to spend time with my kid, go to games, teach him or her how to communicate, take long trips across the country to see how different people live.

And deep down, oddly, I kind of wanted the kid I watched on the television screen to end up a bandit and a folk hero. I wanted that obscure head and tail I saw on the screen to grow up to be an outlaw of sorts, a fugitive. At that very moment I knew that I'd always keep up with Ted and Teresa's boy and help him out whenever it seemed necessary and possible. I'd tell him to keep moving--always--in order to stay content, to talk to strangers no matter how scary it might seem.

"I pointed at Sparky. Without his thumbs, it looks like he could use his fists as skewers."

"Right over the image of my as-yet-sexless child, Hoss talked to Little Joe about how skittish the horses seemed."