I Could've Told You if You Hadn't Asked

Desmond wanted to make a movie called Chickens. He wasn't sure if he had the imagination to pull it off, and he had no hope of grants or investors. The one thing he did possess was a beautiful but crazy wife, though I didn't know about her right off.

I had no money either, of course, but was getting some notoriety as a visionary, what with the patch of gray hair on the back of my head that looked just like the CBS eyeball logo. Also, I'd predicted three Kentucky Derby winners in a row, the date of Black Monday and Hurricane Hugo's strength, time and place of landing.

I could see, understand.

Desmond said, "I know what I want to do. I just want you to give me the green light, guy. I call it Chickens for two reasons. First off there will be chickens in every scene--somewhere strutting in the background, maybe. Second, I want to train the camera on people and ask them about what they fear more than anything else. I want a man to look into the camera and say, 'The gang violence around here is scaring me more than cornered rats.' Meanwhile he'll be eating a piece of fried chicken. That's subtext, man. I want to see a kid riding a go-cart in circles around his parents' shack, going through a herd of chickens."

I said, "I don't think it's a herd. I think it's a clutch or a brood. You might want to get that down before trying to approach investors. It's a bed of clams and a cloud of gnats and a sounder of boars. It's a troop of monkeys and a knot of toads--that's my favorite, a knot of toads." I'd memorized The World Almanac 'cause it had this kind of information.

Desmond stood there in the small kitchen of my small cabin. I drank Old Crow mixed with ginger ale and milk thistle to help replenish my liver. I'd been sitting there almost nonstop--not always drinking, obviously--since getting fired from my job a year earlier at Coca-Cola in (continued on page 78)I Could've Told You(continued from page 74) Atlanta. I had worked in an advisory and public relations capacity, but I'd been on a downward run with the higher-ups ever since I said publicly that the new Coke they wanted to market wouldn't whatsoever.

Desmond said, "You know I'm not as smart as some people think I am. I'll admit that. You know my wife wants to leave me because she has fulfillment issues. She says I'm not performing to what she saw as my capacity when we married."

I said, "You're going to have to give me a minute to think this one out. It might take me some time to puzzle out what Hollywood wants and what the people want."

Desmond said, "I need some time to write the script anyway."

He wore a pair of khakis that didn't quite fit anymore. They hung down low, and his stomach stuck out like a silhouette of Stone Mountain down in Georgia. Desmond and his nutty wife moved from New York down to Christ Almighty, North Carolina about the same time I made enough money to move up and buy a summer cabin, long before I understood that I might have to move there for good. Desmond thought he'd absorb some of the South for the best-selling novel he planned to write, but the South absorbed him.

Desmond pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. I said, "There's a job down in Tryon with First Realty. They're looking for someone to put up For Sale signs. I think they pay ten bucks to put up a sign and five for pulling it down once the house is sold. Here's what you do--get the job. Put up the signs. At night drive around and knock the signs down. They'll ask you to put the signs back up and you'll get paid twice. Let's say you only do ten signs a week. That's only $100 a week. But if you keep knocking them down, you could make fifty bucks more. Plus you get the $5 for what sells." I mention this conversation to show that, contrary to his subsequent claims, I told him all these scams before I ever laid eyes on his wife.

Desmond said, "I want to make movies. Films, dude. I've given up writing novels about upper-middle-class people trying to find out about themselves in new and exciting ways."

I got up and made another drink without as much milk thistle because I felt dangerous. I said, "After you make the money by peckering around with real estate agents, go put down money on a lush apartment. You put down one month's rent and the security deposit. Pay in cash. Lie about your name. Then place a want ad in the papers for the apartment for about half what you pay."

Desmond said, "Weldon. I don't want to go jail."

"You ain't going to jail, man," I said. "You're a filmmaker. How many filmmakers are in jail, outside of that guy who can't come back to America for what he did with an underage female?"

Desmond held his head funny. I old him to get some nice furniture, tell prospective renters that he'd gotten a one-year job somewhere and wanted to keep the apartment. I told him to get a post office box and a telephone his wife wouldn't know about.

Desmond said, "Five people a day come in for one month. I show them the apartment, say it's furnished and take their money?"

I said, "Ask for cash. Say you don't believe in checks. Give them receipts. In no time you got enough money to make your movie." Before Desmond could think about it I said, "Three hundred dollars for the first month, $300 for the security--that's $600. Six hundred times 150 people. That's $90,000. Hell, rent out three or four apartments and you can go beyond documentary-style black-and-whites. Goddamn, boy, I see a major motion picture in your future."

Desmond said, "My wife's not a patient woman, Weldon. This has to happen fast."

I said, "Go rob a bank. Rob a bank, then make your movie. I wouldn't, but you might."

Desmond shook his head. He pulled his khakis up, then combed his hand through where he wanted more hair. Outside, a hawk circled above Lake Christ Almighty. I tried to think about people in a theater watching a movie with chickens in every frame but couldn't.

•

I found Desmond's wife dumping ice deliberately, a ritual I'd heard about but taken for myth. Desmond's wife went in the back door to their added-on house and brought back one of those styrofoam chests for transporting good meat or vital organs. She stepped softly. She was wearing padded bedroom slippers. I didn't speak because what she was doing looked a lot like what I imagined ancient Asian religious folks did during their somber ceremonies, or how a talented seer might act in times of rare planetary alignments. Desmond's wife sprayed Num-Zit first-aid medicine between her ice mounds.

"Are your soles soft rubber?" she asked with her back turned. I swear to God this is true. What I'm saying is, this woman was both cosmological and ontological somehow. She may have been teleological too, but I don't remember all my metaphysics from college.

I said, "I just wanted to come and see if Desmond was doing OK. I wanted to see what he's working on these days." I wasn't sure if he'd told his wife about Chickens. I didn't want to give any secrets away in case he kept plans to himself. It's a male code.

Desmond's wife stood there holding the styrofoam. She wore a thin cotton print skirt that let light flow through--her upper thighs could've been used as sturdy, solid thin masts, is what I'm saying--and a T-shirt that read Vote Your Uterus. It kind of gave me the creeps, but I swear I couldn't keep my eyes off it. She had big knockers. Desmond's wife said, "The earth is our mother. Walk softly. I'm about to plant a garden, and I don't want my mother to hurt whatsoever. I'm numbing her skin before I dig. I'm numbing the dirt before I dig or hoe or scrape."

I couldn't say anything except, "Shew--I don't want to hurt the earth none. I wouldn't also want to disturb a grist of bees or a down of hares." What the hell.

Desmond's wife said, "You didn't major in geology, did you? I hope you didn't major in geology."

I about told her I never went to college. I said, "No. I majored in philosophy in undergraduate school. Then I went on to law school and quit before the year was over. I never was good at the sciences, really."

"Geologists become miners. Miners end up drilling holes in the earth. You wouldn't go to a dentist and have him drill into your teeth without any kind of painkiller, would you?"

I said, "Tell Desmond I came by and I'll try to get in touch with him later." I started to walk away, back around the cold shallow lake to my little cabin. I kept thinking how men down here pride themselves on not coon dogging what's already been treed. We don't actively pursue a married man's wife, is what I'm saying. We kill the husband more often than not, or at least get him (continued on page 86)I Could've Told You(continued from page 78) in a situation that involves a long prison sentence. Thinking about it almost made me have a Pentecostal fit, all thick-tongued and spastic.

"You ever been to a proctologist?" Desmond's wife asked me. When I turned around, she didn't seem to squint as much as she seemed to want to cry, or pass two kidney stones the size of a bad carpenter's thumbs.

I said, "I just sit in my room and think, ma'am. I work as a freelance consultant these days for admen who can't come up with ideas and don't want to lose their jobs. Please don't judge me or anything, please."

Desmond's wife said, "My husband went down the mountain to do some work. He won't be back until way past ten or eleven tonight."

This was a Sunday. Realty offices were closed. I knew what Desmond was doing. I laughed and said, "Hey, do you cover your land in sheets of plastic when it hails?"

Desmond's wife took out a little memo pad from the elastic band in her skirt and wrote down something. She smiled and raised her eyebrows. She looked like God had let her down on a handmade sunbeam.

I didn't understand until later that maybe women from up north kept track of when their husbands returned. Maybe I'd gotten too caught up in my own ways to realize Desmond's wife was sending me a signal.

•

I left Desmond's wife and went home until the sun went down. Then I made my way backward toward every sign I'd seen lately from First Realty, knowing he'd be nearby in stocking cap and black gloves, sweating from the humidity. I found him hidden in a carport adjacent to the sort of solid cedar-shake shingle house admired and purchased by people who have a thing for armadillos and alluvial outcroppings.

I said, "Desmond! Get out of there, man, it's me!"

Desmond shimmied goofily, holding his hand up against my pickup's beam. He said, "Weldon, you scared the shit out of me."

I said, "I meant to. Your wife said you wouldn't be back until late, so I guessed that you got a job doing what I said."

"Well," Desmond said. "I got to do what I got to do in order to do what I want to do, you know."

I said, "Uh-huh."

We shook hands. He'd already thrown down the For Sale sign a good 20 feet from where he had planted it earlier.

Desmond said, "You didn't tell me to wear different-sized shoes when I did this. But I'm wearing different-sized shoes. I went down to a Salvation Army place in Spartanburg and bought three pairs of boots ranging two to four sizes bigger than what I wear. I wear a normal ten. I figure no one would be able to trace it back to me--unless they open the woodbin where I keep them during the day."

I said, "There are no cops in Christ Almighty, Desmond. I think you're pretty safe."

He said, "You didn't tell Fiona where you thought I might be, did you?"

I thought, Fiona. I had never met a woman named Fiona, but it seemed like a Fiona would be either the kind of woman who'd numb the earth before digging into it or the kind who welcomed strays. I said, "When she told me you wouldn't be back until ten or eleven tonight I told her you probably drove all the way to Charlotte looking for a strip joint. Now don't go committing suicide with that posthole digger."

Desmond said, "OK."

"It's a joke," I said. "I didn't tell her anything, you idiot."

"You don't know my wife, Weldon," he said. "I'm not real proud of it, but I have a girlfriend back in New York. I tell my wife I'm going back to deal with an agent or editor. Actually I lost both my agent and my editor. It's a long story that involves a favorite uncle and his cousin's wife's daughter."

Desmond laughed. I tried not to make eye contact and found myself staring at his chin more than anything else. I said, "That's OK," though I didn't think it was. Listen, I took marriage vows seriously--even my ex-wife would have to back me up on that one.

We stood while two jets flew overhead, almost side by side. In the brush beside the house a doe rambled, bedding down. I thought about my ex-wife in my ex-city, living not so far from my ex-job. I handed Desmond a beer out of the bed of my truck and said, "There are no chickens living nearby. What're you going to do about that?"

"When I wrote novels I didn't care about truth," he said. "I published a novel about Vietnam and the women's lingerie industry. To be honest, I didn't know squat about either. I'm from Brooklyn. All you need to know applies to both subjects--camouflage only works for so long."

I did not say how it was the same thing in advertising. I didn't say anything because it felt like we were bonding in the dark and that scared me. I said, "Chickens."

He said, "I put ads in some magazines up north for the apartment. People come down here in the winter, you know. I even said it was a condo."

It would've been a good time to tell Desmond that I had been joking, that I made everything up about how he could make money. But his wife worried that the earth hurt, and I worried that she hurt, too. That's all I could think about there in the dark with one For Sale sign down and another 50 or so scattered around the mountain. No comet or shooting star or UFO showed itself. No Dodge Dart skidded around the curve carrying a trunkload of moonshine. I did not smell marijuana burning anywhere, though I felt hungry and responsible, as always.

"Desmond," I said. "Desmond, Desmond, Desmond. I may have made a mistake telling you how to make money to support a movie. Don't you have any family that believes in you?"

I turned the lights off in my truck and left the engine running. Desmond said, "My dad's dead and my mother thinks I'm still going to write the great fucking American novel. I can't let her down." He shuffled a foot in sparse gravel and said, "I don't have any brothers or sisters and I wasn't that popular growing up."

I didn't ask if Fiona had anyone. I kind of knew. I said, "Fiona numbed the earth so she wouldn't hurt it when she planted a garden or something. Have you thought about keeping a camera turned on her? I don't want to make any judgment about you and yours, but I bet a documentary about your wife would be interesting. Hell, all you'd have to do is buy some security cameras and set them up."

Desmond took a draw from his beer and threw it back into the bed of my truck. He said, "That might be an idea, paisan."

I said, "When's the last time you saw a movie about a person who did things a whole lot differently than anyone else?"

"I don't remember offhand," Desmond said. "I could've told you if you hadn't asked."

With that response I knew that Desmond needed to go back up north. No one in his or her right mind below the (continued on page 88)I Could've Told You(continued from page 86) Mason-Dixon line answered questions with "I could've told you if you hadn't asked." It didn't even make sense. If it did, people would just walk around aimlessly, spouting out answers like "Carson City is the capital, not Las Vegas or Reno!" or "Robert Duvall played Boo Radley!" or 'Jupiter's equatorial diameter is 88,000 miles!" or "Tonga's chief crops are coconuts, bananas and vanilla!"

I said, "Goddamn, if you got such a hard-on for chickens, maybe you can buy a couple roosters and keep them on your property so they'll show up in some scenes with Fiona."

•

I do not know the cost of spy gadgetry, and I didn't ask Desmond how many signs he had set up, knocked down and reset over a two-month period. He bought his chickens first, over the complaints of the home association, and later set up cameras one at a time when Fiona drove down the mountain for ice, Bactine, gauze, Neosporin and whatever else she used to help heal the mother on which we live.

I know I found myself looking across a quadrant of lake water too often. I used binoculars, hoping to see Fiona bent over in a less-than-modest dress. I thought about how my wife was long gone.

The first time I met Fiona she knew I was watching her numb the soil, so I should have known she could feel me watching her 200 yards away. One morning she knocked on my door and I answered. When she said, "You want a telescope?" I could only hope that I'd heard wrong.

"Hey, Fiona. Come on in for some coffee," I said.

She said, "Is it one of those flavored coffees? You know those flavored coffees have chemicals in them that they don't advertise on the box."

I said, "It's regular coffee. I have some bread, too. I was just about to have breakfast. Come on in."

She stood there wearing the only skirt I'd ever seen her wear, the one that sunlight ravished without much effort. Fiona said, "Weldon, right?"

I said, "Uh-huh."

She said, "I know when you're watching me, Weldon. You aren't doing anything weird up here, are you?"

I said, "I'll confess that I watch you. I have never seen anyone care about blemishes so much. I apologize, and I'll quit, but I promise I'm not doing anything perverted. I've had a wife and I've had girlfriends. Not at the same time, either--I took a course in ethics one time in college."

That wasn't true. I mean, I had not taken a course in ethics, which I figured gave me the right to tell a lie. Fiona said, "Did you use any preservatives in your bread?"

I told her I washed my hands between each knead.

•

When we fucked daily for the next six weeks we did so slowly. Fiona wasn't sure about my cabin's pilings--whether or not they were planted loosely--or whether our rhythm might tamp down into her mother like the misstroke of a blunt-ended toothbrush that jabs your gums. I did not tell her about her husband's uncle's cousin's wife's daughter. I did not break male code in that way. And there was no love between Fiona and me, at least that first week: We only whispered about the earth moving, often.

But I said more than once in her ear, "Where were you when I thought I should get married?"

"Probably getting married. Or in Santa Fe learning massage therapy," Fiona said to me more often than not.

•

Desmond finally came over in midsummer. I felt uncomfortable, of course. We hadn't spoken since I told him to scrap Chickens. Desmond said, "Weld-on, I've been thinking. I don't want to be nosy, but how do you live? You don't work in advertising anymore, do you, Weld-on? You don't have a home office upstairs so you can just fax what you're thinking, do you, Weld-on?"

Desmond seemed to have something to say.

I said, "I saved money well and invested OK. I work as a consultant sometimes but don't seek it. I don't like to brag or anything, but people in the industry know me, and when they're out of ideas they get in touch and offer me money. An adman without an idea is an ex-adman in about a 30-second spot."

Desmond said, "Huh."

I said, "I thought you'd be wearing a beret by now. How's it going?"

"Oh I'm set, amigo," he said. I poured bourbon. "I ain't got a story line or anything but figure I can do it through editing. Are you sure this'll work out?" Desmond didn't sit down when I shoved the chair out for him.

I couldn't lie. I said, "Well. Maybe your wife's not as quirky as I thought."

"So you're saying Fiona's not odd enough to star in my film, is that what you're saying? You saying my wife's too average to care about? I don't think you know what you mean, Weld-on."

Desmond had an edge to him. He bowed up on me good. People in the South sometimes think Northerners display a certain curtness, a certain broad and blatant cruelty toward other human beings. It's a misconception that thrives with others--such as how dead black snakes on fence posts end droughts or how crossing a downhill stream will stop a specter. People from the Northeast are kind, really. Unlike me--and the people I know--they don't constantly scheme at ways to kill friends, acquaintances and relatives.

I said, "I'm saying I don't know what I'm saying."

Desmond held his fists at his sides. In this short time I'd already considered throwing him off my porch headfirst, taking the fire poker to his temple or even rigging a clipped and frayed electrical wire from an outlet to my toilet so when he peed out his bourbon it'd shock him hard.

When I stuck up one index finger and shook it like a scolding mother from a Fifties movie, Desmond evidently thought I foreplayed a shot to his nose. He decked me quick, then. He said, "I know about you fucking Fiona, Weld-on. I got movies and I got a lawyer."

•

I've realized that the more isolated a person tries to be, the more people know about him. I'm sure everyone on Mount Christ Almighty and the valley towns of Tryon and Columbus, even smaller Lynn and Greens Creek, knew I had a scalp condition that required dandruff shampoo. Or that I had the occasional bout with athlete's foot when I worked in scawmy conditions or that I had hemorrhoids from worrying too much about my goddamn feet. People knew these things because I could do my grocery shopping at one place only--a family-owned store down the mountain called Powell's.

When this buzz-cut kid handed me a subpoena to show up at Fiona and Desmond's divorce proceedings he held a handkerchief to his mouth. I said, "Have you got a bad cold or something? I took a bath this morning."

(concluded on page 178)I Could've Told You(continued from page 88)

"I don't want to get tuberculosis," he said.

"I ain't got TB."

"Well, you had to go down to the doctor last week, and you haven't bought any cigarettes since, and you had a coughing fit down at the Waffle House," the kid said.

"Oh. Oh, yeah. It's not tuberculosis, man," I said. "It's rabies." I took two quick steps his way so he jumped clean off the porch, eight feet off the ground.

I'd gone to the doctor to get some shots, because I'd been hired to check out the chances of a Disney project in Kuwait. I told them to save their money, but they didn't. That Gulf war thing took place soon thereafter. There you go.

I lied in front of the judge and jury, in front of the packed house at the Polk County courthouse, in front of Fiona, Desmond and their respective lawyers. I said, "No sir. I never had sex with her in my house. It's true she came over as the films indicate." Then I said, "On more than one occasion Fiona came over looking for Bactine, Neosporin and gauze." I made it sound like Desmond beat her or something, but I didn't care.

Desmond had the brains to point one of his little cameras toward my front porch. The jury saw something like 42 clips of Fiona walking in my front door, all but one of me hugging her there. When Desmond took the stand he swore I'd told him about my scams just so I could lure his wife over my way. He'd put his hand on the Bible and everything, and looked the jury straight. Obviously they believed him. Luckily, no chicken followed Fiona over or we might have been sentenced to the electric chair. This was the South.

Of course she lost everything. Juries from the mountains of western North Carolina don't care about mental cruelty or impotence or abuse. It's as if Stand by Your Man is piped into the chambers.

The prosecutor asked me, "Do you know what kind of a person you are, breaking up a marriage?" I sat silent. "You're nothing but a coward, lying like this. Do you know the meaning of coward?"

I tried not to shake. I didn't look up or down or sideways back and forth like an animal confused by rain.

I didn't mention to Desmond's lawyer how the mountains of North Carolina are filled with garnets and rubies and emeralds and mica. I didn't say how one day when Fiona came over she made me lie naked in the sun and placed semi-precious gems on what she understood to be pressure points on my body.

I understood, too. I'm talking sundial--she put a rock right on the end of my pecker. Fiona said, "I am trying to learn the proper and beneficial uses of magnets, but I don't feel sure about myself yet."

In the distance we heard Desmond's roosters crow. Fiona put rocks on herself, and we both fell asleep. I got a sunburn, and when I woke up it looked like someone had written tiny Os on my body. I'd never felt better in my life--when Fiona rolled over on me our white marks fit like pistons, I swear. Let me say right now that it was at this point that I knew I loved Fiona and could work as the conductor on her trainload of neuroses. Call it luck or predilection on her part, but those stones made me feel different about myself and the rest of the world and the way things would end up in the future.

The prosecutor said, "Boy, I believe you got some Sherman in you, what with the way you burned down a marriage with a perfect foundation." He pointed over at Desmond and said, "What else could you have done to this poor man?"

•

Years later on, reading about how Chickens won those independent-film competitions, I had all kinds of reactions, most of which involved duct tape, a simple hard-backed chair, a pistol butt and a smile. I read that in France the movie was called Les Poulets, of course, and audiences considered it some kind of classic. In Holland or Denmark the film went by plain Peep-Peep. Because Desmond won the divorce, he got the house and half of Fiona's worth, enabling him to back himself on his own project. Fiona came from a wealthy family, too. What I'm saying is, I damn near forgot that women named Fiona either numbed the ground when they walked or took in strays or had a trust fund the size of influenza.

We live quietly these days and we compromise. Sometimes Fiona circles that gray patch on the back of my head as if she were mixing a drink with her finger. She says I'll soon come up with a vision for us both. I don't make fun of her when she goes outside at night and cries with the stars and moon. And unlike most people, I'm now allowed to stomp on this earth.

Her T-shirt read Vote Your Uterus. It gave me the creeps. I couldn't keep my eyes off it.

Maybe I'd gotten too caught up in my own ways to realize Desmond's wife was sending me a signal.

I'd already considered throwing him off my porch headfirst, taking the fire poker to his temple.

I knew I loved Fiona and could work as the conductor on her trainload of neuroses.