Mike
&
Sadie Mae
a novel
Judith Z. Marrs
Chalet Publishers, LLC
Arizona Alabama
Copyright © 2010 Judith Z. Marrs
Author’s Note
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, and actual events is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.
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ISBN: 978-1-936395-04-0 [pbk]
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Michael M. Jordan
I miss you.
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the support of my husband and soul mate, Don, who thought everything I did was perfect even when it wasn’t. Without him, I would not have had the confidence to grab that pen and yellow legal pad and start scribbling sentences.
Thank you my family for your patience when I spent too much time writing. My heart beats for you: Ron and Shawn Barnett, Heather and Dakota Tapp, Courtney Barnett and Lisa Lindsay, Donnie Marrs and Brooke Mitchell, Mimi Marrs, Cheyenne Marrs.
My grandchildren: Dominic and Samantha, Tanner, Daylen, Cara, Haley, Alicia and Paige. My great grandson Jackson,
My sister, Josephina. nieces and nephews: Vennie, Hayley, Joseph, Maria, Lil’ Vennie, Marcie, Gabriella, Krista, Sibley, Joseph, Isabella, Wright, Ben, Alex and little angel Bella and all my cousins, aunts and uncles.
Thank you Kay Alford for the hook up with Joy and Joyce at Chalet.
Thanks Mike for being the voice of the book. I didn’t write it, you did. It’s your aura, your sarcasm, your humor and insanity. Sonny, Tommy and Dennis, love you all.
Ron Barnett Sr., thanks for your help and compassion.
Chapter One
In my prime, I was the best Barbra Streisand look-a-like that ever hit San Francisco. Now I’m just Michael M. Jordan, sitting on a front porch in northern Mississippi with a cranky old biddy, Sadie Mae. When it comes to gossip Sadie is a queen, even more so than me, and when it comes to our neighborhood, she’s got a lot to talk about.
Those high-flying days of lip-syncing Garland, Diana and Ms. Bette are over for me. I’m not going to moan about what could’ve-should’ve-been or bore you with a poor-sick-old-me story for which only I am responsible. I hope to find some humor in a world that has forgotten healing, howling laughter. Maybe my choice of words or some of my tales aren’t what you approve of, but that’s just me being true to myself and relating life as I see it. My existence is one big stage and like Shakespeare, the characters I know are both colorful and tragic.
I’m not the hoop-slamming, tall, dark Michael Jordan; I’m the pale, skinny, brown-bearded one that only touched a basketball once when trying to act masculine for my dad, Joe Junior, on my thirtieth birthday. Joe never gave up hoping that I was going through some sort of phase, trying to find myself. I found myself all right. I found myself in heels and a dress. And who gives his thirty-year-old, prissy son a basketball for his birthday? I would have preferred something a bit more delicate. Gramps always told me not to look a gift-horse in the mouth. What does that mean? What is a gift-horse? I just don’t get it, but I accepted it because Grampa Joe Senior said so.
It was two years ago that I moved from San Francisco back to my hometown, Possum Trot, Mississippi, so I could be closer to my parents and my grandmother, Big Mama. Big Mama wasn’t big in the physical sense, but as a human being she had a heart as big as the Pacific and cried that many tears over all us kids.
Another reason for leaving San Francisco was my mother, Eugenia. She would come out to California and spend weeks on end partying with my friends. That lady wore me down, keeping her out of my closet and make-up and making sure she got in early enough to get her three-hour beauty nap. During one of her jaunts to Las Vegas, I had to retrieve her when she lost her money and wound up drunk in a wedding chapel, trying to convince the brides that their grooms weren’t worth the trouble. Each time the minister asked, “Is anyone opposed to this marriage?” Eugenia would throw up her hands and holler, “Hell, yeah!”
When she could limp a straight line, I let her chauffeur me back to San Francisco. I snoozed in the backseat of my rickety, red Ford Pinto and woke up halfway home and let out a throat-numbing scream that caused Eugenia’s hair to turn white. She took off her Family Dollar Store ninety-nine cent, orange flip-flop and tried to slap me with it over the headrest. We started weaving off the road and got stopped by this highway patrolman that thought we were drunk.
“I wish,” I mumbled to no one in particular.
That was when Eugenia and I made the definite decision that back down south was where we needed to be, permanently, closer to some good outpatient care at a reputable mental hospital once referred to us by Mamaw on Joe’s side of the family. Only one day after my homecoming, Joe left the house for a pack of Marlboro Reds in a box and never returned. At least he waited until I was a grownup to bail, so it wouldn’t injure me psychologically.
Eugenia moved to West Memphis, Arkansas, to be with the saner side of the family, and she argues that it’s part of Tennessee and just won’t give it up, but when I mail her a card, if it has Arkansas as the state, she sends it back, then she gripes because she never gets a birthday, Christmas or Mother’s Day card from me. I gave up on living anywhere near her because I knew I was too confused as to what my state would be because Eugenia is very influential and controlling so I moved to Tiny Pines and met Sadie Mae.
We have a lot in common. Sadie keeps me constant company on the front porch of her dilapidated, yellow-brick, green-shuttered house. The home is only twenty-nine years old and Sadie Mae isn’t the handy-woman type. Gutters are lop-sided, full of moldy leaves and yellow paint on the brick is fading like dull gossip. It needs a new roof, and the porch screen door has holes that Sadie has filled in with real cotton balls she picked from T. J. Jefferson’s field down in the Delta.
There’s not much to do in Tiny Pines, so we spend most of our time sitting out on the porch, swatting mosquitoes, having serious discussions. Our conversations center on the neighborhood, Tiny Pines, which was never known to be grand and exclusive or they never would have let Sadie or me move there. Something’s always happening in Tiny Pines and we have the best of times going back and forth in Sadie’s cane rockers as we watch the folks around us.
Sadie Mae is a former lady of the evening, table dancer, observer of life and the best friend I’ve ever had. She swears she’s forty-five, but I’d wager closer to seventy. If you go by reactions, she’s between two and fifteen. It varies with her moods, her temperament, and her eighty-four faces of Eve. She has big, blonde hair, back-combed miles high on top like yellow cotton candy. Her boobs are pointy falsies. Sadie wears artificial neon-blue lashes, five pounds of Avon on her face and gigantic plastic-loop earrings, the kind you see dangling from the kid’s ninety-nine-cent-junk-toy rack at the Dollar Tree Store. Her eyes are crystal-clear piercing aqua-blues, and she can spot a fake in an instant. Her complexion is ivory smooth and translucent for her age, whatever that is. Even her Avon can’t conceal the tone of her pigmentation, but she has rosy red cheeks. Her fingernails are Sadie originals but appear as sculptured over-lays, and she always wears blue polish. Her figure isn’t at all dumpy. With a body suit to hide the chicken skin on her legs and wrinkles and sailor-blue varicose veins, she could probably still boogaloo at any sleaze bar in Memphis, but Sadie chooses to stay home and live off her crazy check. I usually refer to Sadie as that psychotic bitch next door. I guess if she were sane, we would not have connected at all, and I would have missed out on ever knowing the true meaning of the words witch, bitch and best friend.
The day I moved in the house next to Sadie’s, she glared at me, threw up her hands and screeched in her squawking bird tone, “There goes the neighborhood!”
I looked at my shabby surroundings and harped back at her, “I hope it goes and never comes back.”
“And you with it,” she said.
From that moment on, Sadie and I became porch-spuds and formed a bond of us against them … Tiny Piners.
When I first moved to Tiny Pines, Sadie made an attempt at some goofy kind of hospitality and said to me, “Some of my best friends are weird.”
“Yeah, right,” I thought as I arched my brown bushy brows in her direction like The Rock in that movie.
In fact, I’m not even that odd anymore, don’t have the energy for it, but I do dress for the occasion. I just can’t help myself. I don’t know why Sadie thought I was peculiar. Maybe it was the purple gown I was wearing, the one with the high-linen collar that kept getting caught in my perfectly manicured beard that I had dyed faultless-sienna to match my brows and hair, or it could have been my sparkling silvery slippers or my walk or my body language. Sadie didn’t care. I think she was just lonely and needed a co-conspirator, someone to listen to her jarring-geyser of insults, someone she thought to be below her IQ of three. The two chaotic years spent with Sadie Mae have been the worst and the best of the forty-eight years of my ludicrous life.
Most evenings on the old porch Sadie and I watch the vanishing sun drop past the kudzu-covered river bluff, chatting for hours. Then we listen to the weather channel because Sadie always wanted to be a meteorologist but chose lap dancing instead. Once the weather lady said that there was haze in the area. Next thing I know Sadie is wandering around the yard like she’s at the Easter egg hunt at the White House, looking down the street and back at me with her face curled into a question mark.
“What the hell are you doing, Sadie?
“I’m looking for haze, you idiot!”
I never tried to explain the definition of haze. If I did, she would only tell me I was trying to make her feel dumb and stupid. She ambled back to the porch and I told her that someone else, not us, would find that haze. She just wouldn’t let up on it.
“Who the hell is Haze? Who the hell is Haze?”
“I don’t know and don’t care either.”
Now she’s worried that some prowler is going to hide in the dead azalea bushes, jump out and murder us, and the coroner that only has to have a high school diploma or GED in this state will pronounce us dead when we’re not really dead, and then we’ll be buried alive at Twin Oaks Cemetery. I finally convinced her that we have enough folks to worry about around here, so we settled back for a nice talk.
Sadie always has some choice gossip, and I usually have a new horror story about my job washing dishes at the only café in town. Occasionally, we feel guilty about our leisured defamation of characters, but since we only conversate between the two of us, we decided it would be okay to run all the neighbors down and make ourselves feel superior. We thought we were King and Queen of Tiny Pines, or should I change that to the Queen and Queen of Tiny Pines. If you can’t pass our test and qualify as worthy acquaintances, you might as well move because we never give our slurs and insults a rest. At least we only do this inane chattering to each other. We don’t spread gossip; we just have fun with it, confidentially.
From the moment of our first little chitchat, we were like never-ending rusted water faucets, and we couldn’t stop blabbing, day to day and night after night. One day I came home from work and saw Sadie rolling off the porch in hysterics.
“What’s so damn funny? I’m tired, my corns hurt in my new, white, stilettos and the skin on my hands is splitting from washing dishes at that greasy spoon. I’m not in the mood for your howling or snide comments.”
I assumed she was laughing at my Ford Pinto that had just been lambasted with mud balls by some beer-gut redneck, macho creeps that felt threatened by my feminine inclination. Between Sadie’s guffaws, she clued me in on the latest.
Our neighbor, Bennie Sullivan Baker Jones Baggett, who just married her fourth husband in her back yard, did not invite us.
“I didn’t want to go to her ridiculous wedding,” Sadie said.
“Sure you didn’t. You never want to miss a chance to scope out the neighbors and sling insults that always stop at me.”
“And don’t you love it? You get more gossip from me than the number of animals Bennie has kilt.”
“She hates people more than she hates dogs.”
“Let’s hope she doesn’t act on it.”
“Let’s hope she does,” I said and snarled, showing all the teeth I could.
“I don’t know why she lives here, says this place is nothing but a ghetto waiting to happen,” Sadie said.
“Bennie’s the only one I see being arrested around here.”
“I guess dog-slaying is kind of taken seriously.”
“And the sneaky way she went about it was stupid. She could have been hosting dog fights and made her some money.”
“Michael Vick fans unite,” Sadie said.
“God, Sadie, I didn’t know you could be clever.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me yet.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think Bennie noticed that U-Haul truck we had delivered to her house? Think she’ll take the hint and get out of this almost-ghetto?
“I doubt it. She’d rather just complain about it and keep murdering animals.”
“How could she say the death of that cur-dog in her yard was an accident?” I asked
“Oh, that’s not what she told the cops, Mike.”
“What kind of nonsense did they believe this time?”
“She told them a No Trespassing sign was clearly visible on the trunk of her side-yard tree and that this was an illiterate state.”
“She does have a point,” I agreed with Bennie this time.
“What? Teachers in this state work their butts off trying to teach these brats how to read. They can’t help it that the students won’t apply themselves.”
“They should do like my parents did and beat the hell out of the kids until they learned something.”
“You’re an idiot. Teachers don’t beat kids. They could lose their jobs.”
“You can get fired for just being a teacher these days. You don’t even have to hit a kid,” I mumbled, being distracted by newspaper headlines about Mississippi education-budget cuts that meant teachers would be laid off, moved to other schools and get their salaries cut.
“I don’t believe you. I know some teachers around here and by the end of the month they’re sharing food, toilet tissue and their drugs.”
“Oh, hell no, not their drugs.” I was horrified.
“Yes, they only get paid once a month and by then they are out of everything, so like the good people they are, they share. They go into the teachers’ lounge and throw all their crackers, soup or whatever in one stack on the table, they mound up their medications on another table, and the other is stacked with rolls of toilet tissue or other non-perishable products. One teacher they call Killer Miller brings in a truckload of bread from the discount bread store, and teachers are on that truck like mean magnets, grabbing armloads of bread, daring anyone to stop them.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs when the powers that be resort to taking money from poor teachers, and I am not trying to be funny or sarcastic.”
“Liar.”
“Do you really think I am that mean and heartless, Sadie?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hell, you know what I would do if I were them?”
“No, but I know you’re gonna tell me, so shoot.”
“While the teachers were climbing up into that bread truck, I would be scooping the drug pile into my purse.”
“That sounds about like you.”
“Tell me something. If you were a teacher now, what would you need most, bread or drugs?”
“That’s not a fair question.”
“Let’s just hope they don’t start drug-screening these teachers,” I said. “They won’t be able to find enough to teach for any amount of money. We’ll have a teacher shortage because of drug cuts instead of pay cuts.”
Our next-door neighbors made a pet cemetery back in the woods where they have buried Bennie’s victims for the past ten years. When the cops finally discovered it and hauled her off in the patrol car, some of us stood in the middle of the street and watched. We waved goodbye like a bunch of Carnival cruise tourists leaving Ft. Lauderdale, remembering all the times Bennie had called, Claire, the dog-catcher lady and had her cart off pups in her old beat-up black truck with cages in the back. They say what goes around comes around, and now I believe it. I heard some muffled snickers through the crowd as we all dispersed to our own homes to relax.
I encircled my bathtub with fat vanilla candles, put on an Al Green CD and slid in for a soothing hot soak. I felt each muscle relax, but it could have been from the Soma Dr. Chang ordered me under duress. I wish I were a doctor. I’d fill my own prescriptions. Doesn’t he see that I’m not a well person?
After nearing the dried-apple-doll stage, I stumbled from my self-made spa and changed into mauve-flannel pajamas fancied with yellow-rubber duckies. I planted my piggies into lemon-tinted bunny slippers then hopped on one foot down the well-made path back to my perch on the porch with Sadie.
We watched some residents two doors down, Marshall and Hilda King, moving their rag-tag sticks of furniture into a trailer hooked to the back of their new RV that they pay eight-hundred dollars a month for on wage-earner Chapter 13 bankruptcy. They’re a high-credit risk but were able to charge enough gas at the community Stop n’ Go to drive to Dallas where Marshall could finally work just one job. In Tiny Pines, he couldn’t get his lazy wife to work so he toiled all day at Sonic and all night at FedEx loading packages at the Hub and trying to find out what was in the box that Tom Hanks took back to Texas after the island ordeal.
No one could make Marshall understand that Cast Away was just a movie.
“I saw Tom Hanks in an airplane myself right there at FedEx,” Marshall said.
“Marshall,” I said, “in the film, Hanks is on a deserted island for four years, and it’s only been a few months since he was at FedEx, so how can you explain that.”
Marshall was paranoid so we dropped it.
“My job’s not the only reason I’m going to Texas,” Marshall said.
Sadie said, “You’re afflicted, Marshall, and need to get out of the neighborhood before you get worse.”
“In Dallas, I’ll work a forty-hour week as a tour guide at the Grassy Knoll. If the repo man comes by, tell him we moved, but you don’t know where.”
“That’s about the first thing I have ever heard you say that made any sense, Marshall.”
Sadie, trying to be cool and fashionable, said, “Well, duh?”
“Hilda will now be busy watching her fingernails grow.”
“She never fit in here at Tiny Pines anyway. She always thought she was too good for the neighborhood. Imagine that. She was friends with Bennie and was never the same after Ben left for jail.”
“Pity that,” I said.
Police officers are still snooping around, have been interrogating Sadie’s next-door-neighbor, Donna DoLittle, for housing too many cats and an area possum that thinks it’s a cat. No one knows her motives, but Donna’s daughter, Racy, killed one of the cats when she started her mama’s new white truck with a backseat in it yesterday. The kitten had climbed up into the radiator fan area or the engine or someplace only manly mechanics would know about. I could hear the screeching and scrawling all the way down to my house.
Racy would never have known that a kitty had fallen out from under the truck if Sadie hadn’t screamed, “Don’t run over the cat you just killed.”
Sadie has no tact at all.
Racy leaped from her bucket seat and kept screaming, “I didn’t mean it when I told all these cats to go to hell.”
I looked at Sadie and we both cracked up. The next day another cat was found floating face down in the DoLittle’s swimming pool/hot/tub combination. Someone said that Donna enticed the cats with mouse-scented Meow Mix. They now have several dogs hanging out at the house. One of them birthed seven puppies so they appropriately named her Mama Dog. Tiny Piners are in a huff because we now have a flea-infested subdivision. The varmints have affected everyone’s animals except DoLittle’s little dog, Little Bastard, who stays in the house and has an appetite for human ankles, with one exception, Sadie’s.
In one of Sadie’s I-love-dog moods, she reached down to pet Little Bastard. He bit into one of her falsies, and she started screaming like she really had something to scream about. I just turned away laughing, then she chased me back to the house swinging that poor animal by the tail. Around and around it went like one of those helicopter-leafy things that fall from trees. Donna ran out the storm door, begging for mercy on Little Bastard. Sadie looked back and slung the old mutt right into Donna’s arms. It only hit one car and two trucks before finding its way back to safety.
Donna snapped, “You two are full of Satan and shouldn’t be allowed to wander freely away from any mental institution.”
“This whole neighborhood is a mental institution,” some neighbor that could hear the ruckus from down the street shrieked.
Sadie and I turned to see who our potential new friend might be, and Donna hissed and ran back into the house, cooing and sighing to Little Bastard all the way.
I should have known Donna would be in a cranky mood because she was already tired of the police harassing her about her animals when they couldn’t have cared less when her house had been robbed twice. Although fingerprints and skin-tissue samples from where the young hoodlums punched out a window were DNA tested, and the stolen rifles were located at a house in the cove, the cops said there wasn’t enough evidence to file charges.
One officer said, “It’s your own fault Mrs. DoLittle that you were robbed twice because you look too financially well-off for this hood.”
“And what would be your advice, Officer?” she asked.
“Scale down your lifestyle, trade your new truck in for an older model, peel some paint off the house and have some yard sales.”
She put Little Bastard down and the cops left, fast.
“What did you expect, CSI?” I said before I ran.
Sadie said I was going to get myself killed by one of these southern good ole boys if I didn’t at least try faking being somewhat of a manly man.
“Since we just got together, you and me, and we have so much in common, it would be just my luck for you to disappear one night,” Sadie said.
“Girl, if you can’t find me, don’t go looking.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?
I had to clear my throat to find my voice. She was scaring the be-Jesus out of me.
“I don’t need anyone else in my life crossing over.”
“What do you mean, crossing over? Are you pokin’ fun at my clothes again?”
“No, sweet thang, ‘cross over’ means someone dies. You know, like all them folks I read about in the obits every day. I know most all of them or know somebody knows them or is related to them.”
“Do you mean all those dead folks you write to Six Flags Over Jesus about, asking for prayer for their families and friends?”
“Yeah, them.”
“Girl, you’ve had more folks ‘cross over’ than the Mississippi River.”
“That’s what happens when your friends get old and sick,” Sadie said.
“I don’t think you know half of them. You just want something for those poor people to pray about.”
“I’m fixen’ to give them one more to pray about.”
“Thank God, you were startin’ to be too nice to me. I can’t handle that.”
“You can forget that nonsense,” Sadie said.
“I’m fixen’ to go put a For Sale sign on your house that says, For Sale by Neighbor.”
“I don’t know why you have to be so belligerent all the time.” Sadie is such a hypocrite.
“It’s just my way, I guess,” I said. “Talk about me, you’re always in hot water with someone around here. You need to take some lessons in being socially social.”
“Hey, I spoke to you when you moved in, which is more than I can say for anyone else around here. They snootied up on you like you were a slum dog without the word millionaire behind it..”
“That’s just because you told them I was a drag queen in San Francisco before I moved here.”
“You might as well get used to the narrow-mindedness of the South. If you can’t take the heat, get out of hell.”
“Don’t go there,” I said.
“I’m already there with you next door.”
“Okay, Sadie, tell me you haven’t been feuding with the neighbors living in that gray stone house across the street.”
“It’s not stone. It just appears to be stone. They covered their clapboard siding with some new contact paper from Possum Trot Interior Designs that repels roaches and looks like authentic old-English boulders.”
“What do you care?
“I don’t care, I’m just sick of their kid William T. who keeps me up all night with his authentic Rebel yell.”
Lil’ Will is only five but has the mentality of a twenty year old bigot. He built a Civil War battlefield in his backyard where he reenacts the Battle of Shiloh all by himself until the Rebs start losing, and then he says he doesn’t want to play anymore. Sadie and I got into a spat over whether the Yankees up north have reenactments of their battles like the “Good Ole Boys” do down here.
On Halloween Lil’ Will dresses as General Grant and has a voodoo doll of Lincoln that he sticks pins in annually on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. We told him that Abe was already dead, but he called us lying Yankees. Lil’ Will has been kicked out of every school in the county except for Possum Trot Elementary where they allow him to come dressed as Robert E. Lee. Lil’ Will’s parents helped him construct a dart-shooting, computerized cannon for the science fair, and he came in first in the state of Mississippi in his division.
Yes, Sadie and I have some exciting times watching our interesting neighbors. It’s not often you find someone you are so in-tuned to. We’re soul mates. I already know it. We enjoyed the Randall’s eccentricities today. None of this would be as fun if Sadie weren’t with me, but I’d never let her know that. God works without explanation, so I have to trust his plan for my life.
We discovered that the Randalls were being investigated by the FBI for using landscaping techniques that aren’t tacky enough. Their yard looks a little too manicured for this locality and is causing eyebrows to arch. Everyone is questioning if their black-and-white cow mailbox is fake or if they are just being cruel to animals. It makes a moo sound every time the postman delivers the Randall’s cut-off notices. The cow was all Mrs. Randall’s idea. What more can you expect from the woman who barbecued her husband’s white Elvis jumpsuit on the grill last summer?
Sadie said, “I watched that outfit shoot up in flames then told Mrs. Randall not to forget his acoustic Fender geetar? Straight away, the mad woman ran into the house, grabbed the thing and cooked it, too.”
We never discovered Mrs. Randall’s motive, but it must have been a good one. Mr. Randall now leans up against the gates at Graceland in ordinary clothes with a despondent expression on his face.
Chapter Two
The Coopers were in hot water with local bigots for sending their son Donnie to an inner-city school in Memphis, which resulted in our Mississippi Burning story. Area residents think too many people are in and out of the Cooper’s home all hours of the night and day. Drug dealing is suspected. Their daughter, Mimi, has suspicious looking characters visiting her. She’s fifteen and was spotted buying cigarettes at a local convenience store. Neighbors believe Donnie attends the Memphis school so he can be in the best drug-selling arena. The dad, Mr. Cooper, is a long-haired hippie musician, and the mother is posing as a schoolteacher, a perfect cover for her.
A Memphis newspaper is investigating her as part of their teacher witch-hunt trials. The Cooper’s seven year old son, Cheyenne, has been seen in various disguises: Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, Karate men, Kurt Cobain, Shrek and Sweeney Todd. It’s been rumored that he’s a midget and a member of the Mafia or Nirvana. He changed schools five times when it had only been in session for four weeks.
A few years later when he failed the seventh grade, his dad asked, “What about the philosophy the school system has - No Child Left Behind?”
The counselor said, “That’s their philosophy not mine.”
Yeah, they found every way they could to fail the kid. He was accused of having nineteen absences and was sent to court because twenty is the limit if you don’t have doctors’ excuses, so we figured the school system and the doctors must be in cahoots because everyone knows the school teachers’ health benefits suck, too. Not only did the kid and his parents get humiliated by Judge Huddleston, but it ended up that they failed the kid by saying at the school that he had forty-three absences and they didn’t give a damn what the court or attendance officer said. The school counted absences from any class he had ever missed, three of his tardies counted as one absence, and then they said since he was in Special Ed. Math, he couldn’t get a diploma in high school anyway, just a certificate where he can screw up hair or clean bed pans. All because of math and not going to the doctor for a cough and a sneeze. Please. Oh well, this is Mississippi, and they can dang well do what they please in this state. Now the Coopers have put Cheyenne in a Catholic school where he can get a real diploma and become a Mississippi coroner some day.
This family hadn’t been through enough, so someone set a cross on fire in their front yard. We all went out and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Sadie’s big hair almost went up in flames when a spark flew at her. I put it out with a shovel of mud from the Cooper’s ring of dirt where their above-the-ground swimming pool used to be. Sadie was so mad at me that she chased me down the street with a hoe.
I yelled back at her, “You should know all about hoes and how one is used.”
Dang that woman, she made me break the high heel off my favorite pair of gold-fringed white boots.
I came in from work the next day, and Sadie was outside reading the paper. She was smirking again. I ventured over to peek at the rag she was reading and saw an advertisement for junk heaps wanted at Jake’s Dart Mississippi Motors. Most people in Tiny Pines buy their cars there, and none of them lasts over a week, if that long. But it’s one of those you work/you ride things. Another ad was for an old sofa some folks wanted to put on their front porch. We recognized the telephone number -- 781 DIRT and knew he was a resident of Tiny Pines. Then there was the line; “Anyone interested in joining a real together-group or club call 781 OKKK.” Had to be a Tiny Piner.
Sadie and I sat a while longer, passing the afternoon, swatting at flies and dodging wasps when we noticed a group of women gathered by the curb.
Sadie had that gleam in her eye that said, “Let’s go see what those old hens are cackling about.”
We headed over to my yard, pretending to rake litter and strained our ears toward the yackers. From what we could gather, they were up in arms over the latest new residents of Tiny Pines. I have never heard such barking even from the neighborhood strays.
Widow Miller said, “I’m askeered and ready to sell my place.”
Old Zenia Wells said, “I ain’t lettin no perverts run me off.”
The new neighbors they were babbling about were two young girls who had moved into a vacant house close by. They called them the odd couple; one was black and the other white.
Emma Lane said, “If the Lord had meant for all his children to be together, he’d have made’um all white. Lord help’em. Sho nuf!”
Sadie Mae and I walked back along the roadside headed to her place. She stepped into the street, so I followed the lunatic. She thought she was real funny doing all these road theatrics, walking in a zigzag, and dumbass me, following right behind her.
“Hey, Mike, we’re like a car,” she yelled back at me.
“Yeah, we’re all over the road.”
“Hey, look at that dude down the street watering his truck wheels in the middle of the street.”
“Maybe he thinks he’s a car, too.” I said as I watched a trail of people trek through the Dolittle’s front yard in the direction of their backyard pool.
“Who the hell are they,” Sadie said.
“I don’t know, but I’m glad we don’t have a pool.”
“Why would you not want a pool, Mike?”
“When you have a pool, people just come over, get a raft and lay out and then you wonder who’s in your own backyard.”
“Hey freak,” Mike yelled at the driver of a car that swerved to the other lane as he passed.”
“That really makes me feel fat, him pulling into the other lane like that,” Sadie moped.
“Oh hell, Sadie, maybe it will get your mind off your weight if you look in front of you.”
“Oh my Lordy Jesus!” Sadie ran to her house and came back with a camera as I panted trying to keep up with her. She’s older than I am and she could beat me in a relay race. Something is not right about that.
“It was just a dumb old snake. Probably not poisonous enough to do you any harm with all that medication you take,” I said trying to downplay the snake in the road thing. We finally got back to the serpent location.
Sadie said, “He’s gone.”
“He knew we were coming back. That snake probably said, ‘Those were people. I better get. They’re gonna go get something and come back and kill me.’ That snake is bookin’ it now, Sadie, on down through to the Caroline trails.”
“All I wanted to do was take its picture to put in a frame so I could show off that snake that almost kilt us,” Sadie said.
“Let’s just stumble on back to the porch.”
“Okay, Mike. All that we just went through and we didn’t even hear any real trash from the neighbors. This place is getting’ duller and duller,” Sadie said.
“Yeah, girl, I’m with the old widow, let’s move. Too quiet around here. I know, let’s get the water hose out after ’em. That ought to liven’ the place up a bit.”
“Like the time you sprayed ice-cold water in the bathroom window when my grandson Jeremy was taking a shower, you jerk.”
“Yeah, something like that. Bet he closes that window now like you told him to ten-million times before.”
“Don’t have to worry about that. He won’t even come over here anymore. He says I live next door to a screaming, crazy- fool fairy.”
“Girl, who moved in now?”
“You, you idiot!”
She didn’t have to say it so loudly.
Sadie and I sat a while longer, lost in our own idle thoughts. The crowd on the street finally went home, never settling their dilemma, and we watched the teenagers race over speed-breakers until one of the morons lost a tire and ran up into the Elvis freak’s yard. He got out of his low-rider, cursing the speed-breakers. Sadie and I laughed and laughed.
It was unusually quiet in Tiny Pines for the next few days until more African-Americans moved in. I ran next door to get the scoop about all the signs in folks’ yards.
“Why are they having another election?”I asked.
“Those aren’t campaign signs. They’re ‘For Sale’ signs,” Sadie said.
“Girlfriend, please! Let’s go help ’em pack.”
The residents were angry over this new, young black couple. They said the two came in from Memphis, so they knew what that meant. Talk around town has it that they were leaders of a gang, The Trucks. This must be true because they both drive trucks and one of the trucks is a little too clean for any driveways around here. Letters were deposited in our front doors to be on the alert for a black man and a black woman driving dark-colored trucks with tinted windows; they may be armed and dangerous. We discovered the real story on The Trucks later. They were only down here in Tiny Pines visiting a friend, but a cop knocked at the door and handed them a ticket for having Tennessee car tags. They tried to explain that they weren’t Mississippi residents, but the officer would have none of their “lame excuses.”
The Trucks ended up having to go to court and buy Mississippi tags so they said they might as well just go on and move here. We tried to be neighborly and took them a red- velvet cake and a bag of bottle rockets so they would fit in with all the nuts that shoot them down the streets and through yards. Boy, howdie, were our neighbors mad at us for being friendly with The Trucks. They threatened to burn another cross in our yard.
I just grinned and sang at ’em, “O’Bama O’Bama, go go O’Bama.” Then I ran.
We couldn’t help but feel sorry for The Trucks since they moved in next door to Linda Lou Lice and her foul-smelling parents, Annie Lou and Sammie Lou. Linda Lou put a No Smoking sign on her front door to discourage her parents from smoking crack in the living room. Linda Lou was also extremely upset when her parents brought the grill inside to cook hot dogs on the day they celebrated getting qualified for food stamps. But Linda’s sign must have worked because now Sammy Lou and Annie Lou smoke their crack outside. Go Linda Lou!
Sadie and I have been noticing a lot of strange teenagers around the neighborhood lately. One is an escapee from a Memphis fish market where she was being held hostage for eating fish at Captain D’s. Her name is Liser Marie Bell. Liser’s parents own the fish market where she was locked up … Trimble’s Fish Market. They said if she wouldn’t eat their fish, they wouldn’t let her eat fish at all.
Liser Marie rebelled and put up a sign in Trimble’s that reads, “This fish sucks!” That really got her in hot lobster water with her folks and Liser ran away to Tiny Pines. Her mug shot is on display at every Captain D’s in the Mid-South. If you see her, please call 911 FISH.
Sadie and I were told to be on the lookout for a youngster named Lyndsey Bell. She’s wanted in town for breaking Russell’s heart. Russell was her latest flame that everyone said was a good kid until Lyndsey got “a holt” of him. Rumor has it that Russell was too good to Lyndsey Bell. Sadie and I tried to tell Rus it does not pay to be nice. He believes us now because now Ms. Bell is madly in love with David Dork who treats her like crap.
Some neighbors warned us if we saw a small, pea-green car racing down the street to call the cops.
They said, “It may be Casey Bell, the local car thief. First, she drove a blue, Chevy pick-up truck that we think she truck jacked in Tunica. She has been seen with her hair in a bun, hanging down straight and oily or in plastered curls. She changes the color bi-monthly. She’s taking pills to turn herself black, but she’s presently at the orange stage. She also paints gang signs on her car windows.”
I said, “Fo sho,” and tried to look frightened as best I could.
Another teenager they said to be aware of is Crazy Mary Bell.
“She’s wanted for shoplifting cigarettes at the local smoke shop. She has money in her pocket but wants to be like a Hollywood movie star. She has natural curly, dishwater-blonde hair and calls adults by their first names. She is disguising herself by using crutches but don’t let that fool you.”
“No shit?” I said.
“Excuse me?” the neighbor lady said.
“What misfits,” I answered.
“Oh, I thought you said something else.”
“Nope, I didn’t say anything else.”
Zennia Wells said, “A young lady named Becki Bell is famous around here for setting the record for getting the most jobs in town. She worked at a tanning spa until she convinced all the patrons to come to her parent’s house and tan by their pool for free. She worked at Sun Hui’s Chinese restaurant until she was fired for stealing all the fortunes out of the cookies. She worked at Palermo’s Pizza until she delivered a free load of pizzas to the River King’s hockey team.”
We got more info on Becki Bell that she worked at Ziggner’s Shoes until they got tired of her sending all their customers to Janie Rose where she told them that they could get a really good deal on shoes that last longer than a week and clothes to match. She is trying to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for most jobs had in one year. She now steals CDs from old hippies, dyes her hair a color no one can figure out and sells beer at Wide Spread Panic concerts.
Another suspicious teenager they clued us in on is Kristy Bell whose mother disguises herself as a painter. Kristy Bell and her mother live on the Delta bluff where they spy on area casinos. They have a telescope on their roof and try to catch gamblers cheating at the slots. The casinos pay them well for this service, but the mother still paints houses every day because she says she loves it.
Zennia said, “They are both armed with spray paint. Watch out.”
Ashley Bell seems to be the outcast of the group because she is a smart school dropout. When she left school in eleventh grade to get a job and support her grandmother, the principal told her she’d never make it and not to even try to come back there unless she wanted to be put back in ninth grade.
Sadie said, “Was he nuts? She had already passed ninth grade.”
“I didn’t know you could add and subtract, Sadie.”
“I’m gonna subtract you, fool.”
The girl ended up at Gateway Home Schooling School that seems to be the fastest growing school in the county. She completed her education a year ahead of her classmates and then became a teacher herself. That old principal is trying to get his head out of the mud somewhere down in southern Georgia where he fled when he heard about Ashley Bell’s success.
Mimi Bell is the leader of this gang of teenage girls. She created a gang-signal hand sign for the group in which she holds two fingers up in a peace sign and puts the other hand in her pocket. Wonder where she got that idea? She disguises herself as a hippie and has small twinkle lights glowing all over her bedroom, the gang’s hangout. Initiation into the gang is to try and fill the room with five-hundred teenagers at once, all drinking lime Kool-Aid off the rocks. These youngsters can be seen sneaking out after midnight and racing to Taco Bell, the gang’s namesake.
“Be on the alert, they will steal your car, cigarettes, CDs and even your dog,” Zennia said.
Sadie and I actually became acquainted with the Bells and found out they aren’t so bad after all. Now and then they hang out at Sadie’s and ask us questions about the sixties.
“I can’t remember anything about the sixties,” I answered.
Sadie said, “He can’t remember anything at all.”
One day when the Bells were on the porch with us drinking lemonade we watched the area boys’ gang drive by. The Neighborhood Watch patrol had already alerted us about them: Donnie, Travis, Brad, Josh, Jason, Juno and Joey. They are disguised as clean-cut, all-American boys. They put up a good front by playing sports: Play Station, Wii, Farm Town and other forms of normal recreation. But what are they really up to? Rumor has it that some of the boys have formed a southern classic rock band.
We don’t know if Travis is a real name or a stage name, but we do know he can be found with a weird straw hat on his head that some say is permanently attached, the hat not the head. Donnie is said to be a drummer when he is not kicking footballs at that inner-city school, and someone said he had been spotted playing drums at Fernando’s Hide a Way. Joey flies airplanes and plays bass at the same time, and Juno plays guitar and is trying to figure out a new way to pick his guitar ten miles from the concert and still be in the band. Their close friend, Brad, drives a car which he paid ten-thousand dollars cash for so we know something’s up with that. Donnie was seen driving a car he bought from Jake, so we know it’s broke down by now.
“Come on guys, we know there are no good kids left; who are you trying to fool? And that music you’re making...sounds too good for kids; make it sound more like crap and we’ll believe you.”
Eventually, the All-American boy gang started hanging out at Sadie’s, too, and they aren’t so bad either. One of the guys came running up to us just the other day and told us about a new neighbor we refer to as Green Thumb. Green Thumb’s front yard is “All that,” as the kids say, but his side-yard may be his downfall. Green Thumb is also under surveillance because he has a white German shepherd that wears a red bandanna; a sure sign of gang activity. Don’t laugh. Dog gangs are on the rise down here. We just never thought it would happen in Tiny Pines.
Green Thumb’s dog is a white male, hard to believe but true, so beware. One day we saw the white dog trotting down the side walk in front of Sadie’s house when suddenly he started this high-pitched yelping and gyrating his limbs in all directions, jumping up in the air, biting at the wind and howling. Then as quickly as he started, he quit, got back to normal and ran on off. A few minutes later we saw Green Thumb following the dog’s trail. Green Thumb pressed a button on some apparatus he was holding, and then we heard the dog having another fit on the next block.
“Hey Green Thumb, your dog came by here a while ago,” I said.
“He doesn’t know who the hell you’re talking to, you idiot. He doesn’t know we call him Green Thumb,” Sadie said. She waved at him like a great-great-grandmother would do if she were flirting.
“You talkin’ to me? Green Thumb said.
“Uh, yeah,” I tried to sound brave but had thoughts of horse heads in my bed.
“What?”
“If you’re looking for your dog, it just came by.”
“Oh, I’ll find him with this little radar electrical charger.” He grinned and kept walking, trying to avoid cracks in the sidewalk.
“He doesn’t give a damn about his mother’s back,” I said.
“What?” Mimi Bell asked.
“We used to say if we stepped on a crack it would break our mother’s back.”
The Bells ran for the sidewalk, doing an in-depth search for sidewalk cracks, and were stomping the hell out of them.
The All-Americans, Sadie and I laughed our rears off later, as we recalled the story of the white dog and Green Thumb. We had him feeling so guilty that he went home and made a menagerie in his house and started a business selling exotic pets. The aroma coming from his house made him feel like a real member of the neighborhood.
Some days I don’t really feel like getting up for work, but the thought of coming home to Sadie’s afterward perks me up.
As I was leaving for work today, I saw her moving a large box into her house. She had bought a new computer from the Cable Shopping Network. She was all worried because the neighborhood had been infiltrated with a computer bandit, Hal Jones. He had been seen going door to door servicing area computers, free of charge.
That night after work, Sadie and I played around with her computer in the AOL chat rooms, made her a Facebook page and a MySpace and talked with the Bells. They said they had over one-thousand friends on their Facebook.